


the long way down

by happyberry



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Addiction, Alternate Universe, Childhood Trauma, Everyone Is Alive, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, in which the real clown was childhood trauma and internalized homophobia all along
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 09:36:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 41,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20655053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/happyberry/pseuds/happyberry
Summary: It just feels like how things should be. The two of them getting dinner after work, their knees touching under the table, Eddie mad at him for no good reason. There are twenty years between who they used to be and who they are, but still. It feels right and Richie can’t shake that.





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> a couple of things:  
\- the rest of the group is going to be involved on some level but from the next chapter on things are going to be heavily focused on richie and eddie  
\- this is going to be a story about working through childhood trauma, internalized homophobia, and compulsive heterosexuality. if a certain chapter is going to be heavy on something in particular, i will warn for it, but that is the basic premise of the story. so if that's not something you're up to, this is your warning!  
\- hope you enjoy!

_It’s 1989 and you’re in love with your best friend._

_There is a certain bitter taste to the water this summer and the heat of the sun on your skin is suffocating as you bike down the street behind him, yelling that you’re going to catch up. He yells back something that makes your heart skip just because he was the one who said it._

_Sprinklers dash you both with water and people watch you go by, and it amazes you how no one knows. How none of them seem to be aware of the secret you hold against your chest like a bird with a broken wing._

_It can’t fly without you and neither can he._

_The road ends as a sharp cliff’s edge and the two of you pedal on, not even considering the long way down._

—

Richie Tozier wakes up from a dream in his Santa Monica apartment, mouth dry and sheets soaked through with sweat.

His room is a mess, stuff everywhere. Someone once told him that was a symptom of his ADHD. Not noticing the mess around you or not caring about it. He can’t remember which, but it seems true. His desk is covered in nail clippers and empty pill bottles and unused contact lenses and cards from relatives and sticky notes.

Don’t even get him started on the state of his closet.

He checks his phone and sees that it’s one in the afternoon and he has nineteen missed calls, so he pushes that number to the back of his mind and concentrates on brushing his teeth and his hair and not taking a shower.

He regrets the not taking a shower part almost as soon as he settles down with his laptop and sees the emails that are piling up. One of his writers wants to meet up later on and he knows what that means. A couple of hours in a cocktail lounge pretending he cares what his demographics are.

As much as he loves being on stage, well—the rest of it drives him insane.

So he ignores the emails, too, and starts falling into his usual, cyclical routine. New tab, type a few letters, auto fill, press enter. He skims his social media, checks a few gossip sites that he really needs to stop looking at, and watches a couple videos of cats jumping into boxes.

Cats that jump into boxes aren’t exactly trendy anymore, but Richie definitely falls into _their _demographic and can’t get enough of the concept as a whole. He wishes he’d known about cats and boxes when he was a kid. That would have been his entire thing. He wouldn’t have ever left the house.

On around the third time he checks Facebook he realizes he has a friend request, which is odd.

His personal account isn’t listed under his real name and is functionally impossible to find by design. So he never really gets friend requests and in all honestly mainly uses the site to see pictures of his two year-old niece who's already funnier than he is.

The guy requesting to be friends with him has his page set to private and his name is Stan Uris and—shit. Richie throws his laptop to the side and gets on his hands and knees, peering under his bed. It takes him a second before he sees it and thinks, yeah, that one. He pulls out the plastic container closest to the wall and flips the top off.

It takes a bit of digging, but he finds the yearbook he was looking for, with DERRY HIGH SCHOOL pressed into the dark blue cover and what looks like a pizza sauce stain on the corner. Sorry, Mom.

Sitting cross legged, he turns the pages until he finds the ninth grade class, amused by the picture of himself with a goofy grin on his face and the coke bottle glasses he was still a few years away from shedding. Stanley Uris is right after him, curly-haired and solemn in a way that makes Richie think the school photographer had probably given up on getting him to smile. It's weird—he hasn't thought about the guy in years, but he has the distinct memory of the two of them in his dad's car, trying to teach each other how to parallel park. He's pretty sure it didn't go well.

He leans over and pulls his laptop back toward him. Hesitates. Then accepts the friend request. He’s could swear he went to that kid’s Bar Mitzvah.

A couple hours later he’s on the phone with the writer who wanted to meet up, an annoyingly charismatic guy named Bobby, and he’s almost forgotten about Stan when he gets a message from him.

_Stan Uris_: Richie? This is you right?

“—so if you were going to start writing some of the material, there’d be a schedule to follow,” Bobby is saying, with the sound of the I-5 in the background.

“I mean, yeah." Richie has his phone tucked against his shoulder now as he types a reply. “I figured. Or what I mean to say is that I'm aware. Of, uh. Your effort.”

_Beep “Beep” Richard: _unfortunately yes. how’s it hanging stan the man

“Right.” Bobby doesn’t sound convinced. “Well, I just want you to understand that before you make us any promises.”

“For sure. Look, Bobby can I call you back? We can meet up tomorrow. I’ll get up early and everything, swear to fucking God.”

Bobby grumbles in agreement and hangs up and Richie pushes his glasses up and off his face, rubbing at his eyes before his computer makes that little noise that means he has a new message.

_Stan Uris_: Jesus. No one's called me that in forever. But uh. Kind of not great.

Richie bites at a hangnail. He wants to ask Stan how he found this page, how he even remembers Richie, and why Richie of all people is who he’s reaching out to, but none of that feels like what he’s supposed to do right now.

_Beep “Beep” Richard: _are you alright??

Stan’s next reply is almost instant.

_Stan Uris: _You remember everything that happened when we were kids, right?

Richie...doesn’t. Not really. His childhood’s always been a blur. He goes months without talking to his parents. The oldest friends he still talks to are from college.

He’d be lying if he said he never wondered why. He just never wanted to dig deep about it. Anytime he came close, he’d feel nauseated, sick to his stomach. The closest he got to scared in his adult life. It was never worth it.

_Beep “Beep” Richard: _is it bad if i say no…?  
_Stan Uris: _Honestly it’s probably better that way.  
_Beep “Beep” Richard: _yeah? um. hey man seriously...are you okay? because like, i’ll come see you if you’re not. or something.

Richie’s head hurts and he leans over to grab the yearbook from where he left it. It’s still open to the ninth grade class. He goes down the list of names and is surprised by how fast the faces jar his memory.

Bill and Ben and...Eddie. Christ, Eddie—he is not equipped to deal with his feelings about Eddie right now. And there’s Beverly, too, red-haired and smirking, the last recognizable face before him and Stan. But he swears there was someone else who tied them all together. Feels like he’s looking at a present without a bow.

His laptop makes that sound again.

_Stan Uris _: I’ll be alright...but would it be okay if we talked sometimes?  
_Beep “Beep” Richard: _yeah i don’t mind. you’re kind of hot now actually.  
_Stan Uris_: Lol. Well now I’m sure it’s you.

Richie grins to himself and bites at that hangnail again.

_Beep “Beep” Richard: _not gonna lie i had to pull out the yearbook to jog my memory  
_Beep “Beep” Richard: _but it still feels like i'm forgetting someone  
_Stan Uris: _Forgetting someone?  
_Stan Uris: _Oh wait. Mike isn’t in there, remember? Homeschool?

Fuck. Richie does remember. Mike is the bow. He sits back on the couch and breathes in deep. In then out.

_Beep “Beep” Richard: _duh losers club. of course  
_Stan Uris: _Lol. Well I have to go do some stuff around the house. I’ll talk to you later. :)  
_Beep “Beep” Richard: _k :p

Richie falls back against the back of his couch and tries to take a minute to center himself. It feels like a functionally impossible task, like wading through a waist high ocean of Jell-O, thick and sticky and vast.

It’s not like he forgot about any of them, like he forgot about living in Derry and all that entailed, but he has certainly avoided thinking about it. Allowed his memories to dissolve and fade away from lack of use. The emotions he has regarding all of them, the seven of them together, feel like a hole in his heart he previously thought was just emptiness.

Jesus.

He gets up and heads for the fridge. Fuck it. Time to get drunk.

—

It’s a couple days before Stan talks to him again, which is good. It gives Richie some time to halfway process his emotions, to do some more digging and find some pictures tucked into notebooks. There’s a strip of photobooth pictures, all seven of them squeezed into each shot, that he must have last been using as a bookmark sometime in high school.

Stan’s first message is a simple _What are you up to? _and Richie sends a picture of his find.

_Beep “Beep” Richard: _look familiar??????  
_Stan Uris: _Just a bit. I didn’t know you were the one who got to keep it. No fair.

From there, the talking does become a regular thing. Richie can’t remember the last time he had someone in his life like this. Maybe his ex-girlfriend who threw her mint julep at him? They’d texted a lot so, yeah, probably her. Talking to Stan is different, though, there’s an oddly low level of pressure concerning the whole affair.

Mostly, Stan sends pictures of birds he sees and puzzles he’s completed and Richie sends pictures of old stuff he’s starting to find in Rubbermaid containers.

They don’t really talk about the past, even though it crosses Richie’s mind every time he looks at Stan’s profile and sees the words _From Derry, Maine_.

He stumbles through meetings with writers and his agent and falls into bed with a glass of dollar store soda mixed with top-shelf whiskey most nights, cycling through the abundance of channels on his television before rolling over and grabbing blindly for his phone.

The only point at which his confidence leaves him is when Stan asks to call him one night. And even then he’s half full of liquid courage so he just powers through.

“It’s really fucking weird to hear your voice,” he admits, mumbling an _oops _to himself as he lets his drink dribble onto his sheets.

“Yeah? I mean, yeah. Yours too. Although, you know, I’ve seen you on TV, so. A little different.”

Stan sounds sweet, normal. Well-adjusted but with a nervous energy that makes the pitch of his voice rise on the end of sentences, turning everything into a question.

“God. I have to force myself to forget people who knew me as a kid might see that shit.” Richie’s dabbing at his spilled drink with a discarded sock, feeling grimy and ashamed by the action but also unwilling to get up and do something more normal. “You don’t think anyone else watches, do you?”

He’s always kind of imagined their reactions. Bev in the front row shaking her head, Mike slumped down in his seat and laughing into his hands, Eddie standing up in the middle of the crowd and yelling that he’s lying, he’s a liar, why the fuck is he lying about _everything_—

“Most of them have. Maybe not Ben? He’s a little spacey these days.”

The words ring in Richie’s head like a bell. “Wait...what? Do you talk to the rest of them?”

Stan is quiet for a moment before clearing his throat and Richie can hear the sound of music playing in the background, something classical. “Sometimes. They were all easier to get ahold of than you, and if I’m being honest?”

“Be honest, Stanley.” Richie throws the sock across his room.

“No one else _really _talks to me, except maybe Eddie.”

That feels like a still warm knife in the heart, quick and sudden and bursting with pain. Richie flops back on his pillow and stares at the ceiling. “Eddie? Huh. Who would’ve thought. What’s he, uh, up to?”

“Some boring business bullshit.”

Richie chokes out a laugh. “Sounds like Eds.”

“He tried to explain it to me one time. It wasn’t like it was that hard to understand it was just...boring,” Stan admits, sounding a little guilty. “But, hey. I know he’s gonna be in LA in a couple weeks.”

“Oh. Yeah?” Richie closes his eyes and wishes he wouldn’t have heard that. He’s hard wired in this particular way. Knowing there’s an opportunity, a chance that he might not get again—he can already feel the panic settling in. He wants to figure out a way to make something happen here, because if he doesn't he'll never forgive himself. “What like...for work?”

“Mmh. He didn’t exactly tell me about it, just made a post that I saw. I guess he’s never been so he was asking for recommendations about what to do.”

“I feel like I should add him,” Richie blurts out, immediately regretting it. He kicks at the blankets at the end of his bed. “I mean. To fuck with him. Like old times. You know.”

“Uh...huh.” Stan doesn’t sound convinced. “I can mention that I've been talking to you if you’re okay with that. I haven’t told anyone except Patty, but I—”

“Tell Patty everything, I know.” Richie can’t help but smile. He feels about Stan and Patty the way he always wanted to feel about his own parents, who divorced a week after his eighteenth birthday. Like most things in his life it made a better punchline than an actual experience.

He leaves it up to Stan and lets him go. He doesn’t even bother to plug his phone in or turn his television off. He just rolls over and wills himself to fall asleep.

He ignores the sound of three quick, succinct notifications that light up his phone like wildfire.

He’ll deal with that shit in the morning.

—

_Edward Kaspbrak has sent you a friend request_  
_Stan Uris: _Fair warning Eddie said he’s going to kill you.  
_Stan Uris_: I mean, he still doesn’t have the upper body strength required, but the threat was made.

—

Richie sits on it for a couple of days.

He feels like an asshole, but it’s something he wants to discuss with his therapist, a middle aged woman with horn-rimmed glasses who he’s trying to open up to as an alternative to taking a handful of whatever pills he can get ahold of and chasing them down with a mixed drink.

So far things haven’t been going great with regards to that, so the Eddie story feels like a peace offering.

When he finally does get to that appointment she does what she usually does, listening to him with a blank slate face until he stops talking for fifteen minutes straight. Then she asks him what he wants to do.

“I mean obviously I want to fucking talk to him,” he says, to this woman who doesn’t know him or his friends as they were that summer, has never heard of a bike named Silver or a town where people die and disappear at six times the national average. She never saw Richie reach out his hand in a movie theater arcade only to have it slapped away. She doesn’t know him at all.

Which is what makes him actually listen to her when she says, “Then why don’t you just do that?”

He leaves his session feeling weightless and accepts the friend request as he slips into the driver's seat of his car. He’s had long enough to mull over the first message he wants to send, so that’s a no brainer, but he does spend a couple of minutes just looking at Eddie’s profile, pretending it doesn’t hurt to see _In a relationship _and grinning at the selfies he has posted. The most recent one is from almost a year ago, and Eddie’s smile is nervous, endearing, and just a little bit judgmental.

God he fucking misses them. All of them. But Eddie most of all.

He pulls up the messenger and doesn’t hesitate.

_Beep “Beep” Richard: _whats up loser i fucked your mom


	2. i.

_You keep seeing him from behind._

_ As he walks out of a room, from a distance and across the way. You see the shape of his ankles and the nape of his neck. You roll over in the bed you’re sharing after falling asleep playing video games and you note the sweat that’s pooled at the bottom of his shirt and the way his arm is bent behind him at an angle that shouldn’t be possible. _

_ It’s early days yet, but you think you know what that means. You’ve figured out that this is what people mean when they say ‘he’s got it bad,' and..._

_You've got it. Bad._

_ You never use his name. Just nicknames and insults, all designed to poke at his weak spots. It does its job, you think, although sometimes your other friends look at you sideways and sometimes he just rolls his eyes at you and he—he says your name. _

_ He says your name. _

—

_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ FUCK OFF  
_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ How are you though?

—

Richie can’t stop pacing up and down the rain-soaked sidewalk in front of him.

The last few weeks have been surreal. He’s spent more time talking to Eddie than almost anyone else, the two of them exchanging messages throughout the day and occasionally at odd hours during the night. It’s been a crash course update on the life of someone he never thought he’d talk to again. Not like Stan where they took things slow and measured, no.

With Eddie it’s been a constant, almost violent stream of updates.

In no particular order: Eddie is on the verge of proposing to his girlfriend, doesn’t think any of the YouTube videos Richie sends him are funny, and apparently wears a suit to work every day. All of it has been a major adjustment, because Richie has never completely expelled Eddie’s ghost from the back of his mind.

The thought of Eddie as a high pitched ninth grader, sending him walls of text about the pros and cons of pear-shaped diamond engagement rings—well, okay. It wasn’t _ that _ far off, but still. An adjustment.

As far as Richie’s concerned, nothing about _ himself _ is wildly different. He still wears glasses, still doesn’t know when to shut up, and is still...well. Talking to Eddie still makes him feel like a kid in junior high who looks across the cafeteria and sees the prettiest girl in the school walking towards him in slow-mo.

It’s just that the prettiest girl in school is Eddie Kaspbrak in gym shorts.

He has a feeling Eddie isn’t going to show up to Sushi Gen in gym shorts that say DERRY HIGH across the ass, but also what does he know. Eddie probably owns cufflinks and loafers now, which makes Richie feel a little lightheaded. This whole thing has been a nightmare in the way only things with Eddie have ever been nightmarish for him.

Two weeks into talking, with what had previously seemed like an insurmountable wall of silence between them, Richie is already remembering what makes Eddie in particular so addicting for him. Their back and forth is a roller coaster, with Richie seeking out the drop again and again over the smallest things.

He went out of his way to get a reservation to this place, cashing in on a substantial favor he was owed by an old improv friend, and Eddie fought the idea tooth and nail. _ Raw fish? _ he’d sent, complete with a slanty-faced mouth. _ You think I’m going to eat raw fish??? _

Richie had proceeded to map out a full meal he could order, no raw fish involved, and promised to drive him to the hospital at the first sign of food poisoning, to which Eddie had relented. It’s always been like this between them, both of them inching the other up and up towards the inevitable fall.

With other people, Richie always feels a second away from making them cry when he pulls out his meanest jokes. With Eddie, he gets back what he puts out tenfold, and it’s...good. Great. Maybe better than anything he’s had in a long time. 

Stan, of course, thinks he’s insane, that they’re both annoying, and that if he ever has to be around them in person again he’ll jump out the nearest window. Richie plans for any and all future meetings of the old group to be in one story buildings.

He’s halfway through unlocking his phone to send that exact sentiment back to Stan when he gets tapped on the shoulder.

“Jesus!” He turns on a dime, already resigning himself to being asked yet again if he’s that guy from television and if they can take a selfie, but instead feels the breath rush out of him like a deflated balloon.

“Nah, just Eddie,” the guy in front of him says with a half-hearted delivery. And he is Eddie. His tie is loose and the bags under his eyes make Richie think he’s been up for way too long, but otherwise he’s the spitting image of his Facebook profile pictures.

Richie glances down quickly and then back up.

Yeah. Fuck. Loafers.

Why does he look cute in _ loafers_?

Richie feels like he should hug him, like that would be the appropriate and maybe even normal thing to do, but his body refuses. So he just stands there stupidly, hands in his jeans pockets as he goes, “No fucking way. You really never went through puberty, huh?”

For a second he thinks Stan was right and Eddie might actually kill him, but instead he laughs and shakes his head and that’s the tone for the night, like all the nights they spent together as kids. Richie chasing after that reaction until he bleeds.

Their booth is set into the wall allowing them a frankly surprising amount of privacy, and they get a pitcher of beer to share while waiting for their food, edamame between them.

“Stan said you don’t really talk to anyone else?” Eddie is wearing a white button up, sleeves rolled up to reveal his forearms. His nails look like he gets regular manicures.

“No, uh. I wouldn’t be opposed, but.” Richie shrugs. He’s more dressed down. Spent half an hour in front of the mirror earlier before settling on a charcoal henley and jeans. Anything else seemed like false advertisement. “I just—lost touch, you know?”

Eddie nods and doesn’t look at him, taking a mouthful of beer and swallowing it down. “Yeah I know. Back when my mom was sick I had to go home a couple times and it was, uh.” His fingertips trace the edge of his glass. “You know the room in your house where you throw all the useless shit?”

“Yeah,” Richie says, and he means it. There was a room between his and his sister’s that had no discernable purpose. It was a guest room, a computer room, a craft room, and then eventually a storage room for old magazines and mattresses and dish sets. “You never look in there. It’s like...a panic attack waiting to happen.”

“Right, so, being back in Derry was like looking in that room in my house.” Eddie’s got that faraway stare, eyes fixated on nothing in particular to the left of Richie’s shoulder. Blank face. “I never realized how bad it was and I was stuck there again until my mom got better. And...she didn’t.”

“Your mom…?” Richie watches as Eddie seems to snap out of his reverie, scratching at the table with his perfect nails. It’s odd. He still seems fussy, but...he always thought of Eddie in terms of beats per minute, musical structure. A sort of unrepentant song that didn’t let up, didn’t know _ when _ to let up.

Eddie, as an adult, seems to have at least begun to explore to concept of silence, even if it’s only momentary.

“She had really bad heart problems in the end. Two heart attacks. It was the only reason I went to see her,” he says, leaning back against the booth. He seems defensive, as if he expects Richie to judge him for this. “She, uh, she died. A year and a half ago now?”

“Fuck. I’m sorry.” Richie says it automatically because he’s not, really. Eddie’s mother was a piece of shit and Richie hated her in the way Eddie was never able to. Maybe _ because _ he was never able to.

Eddie shrugs, and seems relieved when the waitress sidles up to the table with their dishes. The beef teriyaki dinner for him and a sashimi plate for Richie.

He watches gleefully as Eddie struggles with the chopsticks and grins when he offers to help and Eddie glares at him. It’s just...how things should be. The two of them in a booth after work, their knees touching under the table and Eddie mad at him for no good reason.

He knows this is one night only, that Eddie is leaving in a couple days, and there are twenty years between who they used to be and who they are, but still. It feels right and he can’t shake that.

“Do you like it?” he asks, gesturing towards Eddie’s plate once he’s gotten a precarious handle on actually getting the food from the plate to his mouth. It feels like a dangerously date-like question to ask but in all fairness, it's a dangerously date-like situation all the way down.

“It’s better than I expected,” Eddie admits, and Richie allows himself to consider that a win.

They go through the pitcher of beer no problem, and once the food is gone Richie finds himself feeling bold.

“You wanna get more drinks?” he asks, pulling out his phone. “I can get an Uber.”

“Richie. I’m here for work, so I really—I can’t.”

Richie leans bodily across the table and does his best to look needy. It’s not that hard. “Eddie Bear,” he says.

Eddie lets out the most exasperated sigh and then rolls his eyes up to the ceiling. “Fine. Whatever. I’ll drink some more shitty beer with you.”

Richie kicks him under the table and finds out that he can still recognize the look on Eddie’s face that means he’s trying not to laugh.

They leave a very good tip.

—

The Uber ride is weird, because Richie can’t stop talking and pointing things out from the car. He says, “Oh yeah, I forgot the Paramount lot is right there.”

And Eddie leans over his lap to go, “Huh, that’s all?” He’s thoroughly unimpressed.

They both snort over the idea of the driver knowing or caring who Richie is, though Eddie seems oddly fixated on the thought, like it thrills him that there are people who know Richie’s name.

“Wanna hear a secret?” Richie asks, as they pull up to their destination.

“Mm?” Eddie isn’t really that drunk, just tired and giddy in a way that Richie can’t help but feed off of.

He leans against Eddie’s arm and mumbles against his cheek. “I don’t even write my own material.”

Stumbling out of the car, indignant and energized, Eddie says, “I knew it!”

Richie doesn’t think Eddie notices that he’s being lead into the most high scale bar he's ever been in his life, but that's the trick to places like these. They're less gaudy, more discrete. Richie has been in only a handful since his career got on an upward trajectory, and he's still rarely the one footing the bill. Coming here is maybe a slightly desperate attempt at showing off what he's earned, the type of places he's allowed into now.

He thinks that on a scale from one to ten, this falls solidly below waving a black AmEx in the air. Not that he even has one of those.

Eddie is mumbling something about how he didn’t even know you could talk in Ubers while Richie orders them two shots of this blueberry flavored vodka he likes.

“Shots?” Eddie says, once they’re settled in the lounge area, leather seats at their backs. “Is this college?”

“I didn’t go to college,” Richie responds, which doesn’t answer the question but does get Eddie to make a noise that’s almost offensive. “I went to a couple of classes but they didn’t take. Obviously I’m doing fine.”

“You’re a terrible example for children,” Eddie grouses, and then he picks up his shot and downs it.

“Oh, and what did you major in? Being a bitch?” Richie actually grimaces after downing his shot, and has to follow it up with a gulp of water. Eddie shows no such compulsions.

He points at Richie with his shot glass still in hand. “I’ll have you know I went to business school—"

Richie reaches out and puts his hand on Eddie’s wrist. “Eds, I hate to break it to you but the only people who go to business school are bitches. And I’m fine with that. I love a good bitch. But you have to be honest about who you are.”

Eddie is too close to him, and smells like peppermint. Which is a weird thing to smell like. There’s sweat on his forehead and his lips are parted in a way that makes Richie think okay, either he’s going to yell at me or kiss me.

With Eddie, he never really knows.

“Where have I heard that before.” Eddie pulls his arm away and looks strangely cold out of nowhere and Richie’s heart sinks into his stomach like a rock in ocean water.

Neither of them orders anything else to drink.

—

“You sure you don’t want me to ride back to your hotel with you?” Richie asks, when they’re waiting for their rides in front of the bar an hour later.

Eddie shakes his head, arms crossed over his chest. He’s been closed off like that for a while now. “No, I’ll be fine.”

“You sure? ‘Cause...these dudes who drive Ubers are super sexually repressed and creepy about it.” Richie can’t look him in the eye, but he knocks his elbow against Eddie’s side.

“I drove for Uber in college so I know all about the inherent sexual repression.” Eddie elbows him right back. “I’ll be fine, Rich. I’m not twelve anymore.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, “I’m aware.”

Eddie’s car pulls up first, a red sedan with its brights on, and for a second Richie thinks okay this is it. One last night, he’s just going to watch Eddie get in the car and wave and then leave. He’ll message Stan and tell him about how terrible it went and that’ll be it.

But as his own ride pulls up behind them, he’s struck with a sudden rush of frantic energy and he knocks on Eddie’s window until he rolls it down.

“Yeah, sorry, hold on—what?” Eddie looks peakish in the moonlight, but somehow also defiant. It’s a look he’s worn before many times and it strikes a chord in Richie so deep he knows he’ll still feel the echo of it in the morning.

“Can I see you tomorrow?” Richie asks, words fumbling out of his mouth clumsily. “I fucked up but that’s, you know. That’s how this is gonna be, me and you and all of us. And I can’t, I can’t leave it like this.”

“Richie,” Eddie says, like it’s the saddest thing he’s ever had to say. His eyes are so fucking big. Richie won’t and would never without his permission, but god he wants to kiss him. He’s chased after this, right here, for two decades now and never managed to find another person who makes him feel this way. Who makes him want to kiss them when they’re sad, angry, sick and tired.

Eddie always brought out the best and worst in him.

“If you don’t want to see me then I fucking get it and that’s fine, but—“

“_No_. I mean, yes.” Eddie looks as surprised as Richie feels. “I seriously have to go you fucking freak of nature...but yes. I’ll text you. Okay?”

“Okay,” Richie says, the cool feeling of relief washing over him like water. Eddie rolls the window back up and Richie wishes he could do more than pathetically wave at him as the car drives away.

He takes a few steps back and then looks around before realizing his Uber already left.

“Fuck me.”

—

Richie gets on the phone with Stan in between trying to write and self-medicating to calm his nerves.

“Yeah, it went great except for the part where I, you know, asked about his dead mom,” he’s saying, stalking back and forth in his living room, glaring at the eyesore brightness of his laptop screen. “And, oh. When I called him a bitch.”

“You call him a bitch all the time.” By now Richie knows Stan as an adult well enough to be aware that he’s on lunch at work, eating grilled chicken and broccoli which is apparently his lunch every single day. The thought makes Richie feel insane. Eating the same thing every day for lunch is not normal behavior, and if he was in the right mindset he’d type that up on his Google doc full of possible material.

“No. I _ called _ him a bitch all the time. Now I barely know the guy.” Richie sits down on his couch for half a second and then pops back up again. He can't sit still, he physically can't do it. Not right now. “It’s so weird, dude.”

“Kind of like it was weird to talk to me at first?” Behind Stan is the gentle hum of either an air conditioner or a photocopier or both, background noise to the already calm cadence of Stan’s practical feedback.

“No, not like that.” Richie is rubbing his thumb across his bottom lip, over and over again, desperate for some kind of stability. “I’m going to sound like a dick but you’re, I don’t know. You’re...easy mode on Tony Hawk Pro Skater.”

“Ah, hm.” Richie can see Stan in his mind’s eye, nodding like that makes complete sense. “Eddie is extreme mode and you keep falling down.”

“Thank you for following,” Richie says, but only half of his relief comes from Stan getting the joke. Mostly he’s glad he didn’t have to say the rest of what’s on his mind. “But yeah, I’m going to meet him at his hotel in a couple hours for dinner.”

“Richie, that’s great. Do I have permission to relay this to the group chat?”

“The what now.”

Stan has the decency to sound sheepish. “The um. The group chat that everyone’s in besides you and Eddie.”

Richie’s laptop makes a sad little noise and powers off. He pulls his glasses off his face and pushes the side of his hand against his eye. “That’s a thing, huh?”

“It’s only existed for like...a couple weeks now. I was going to invite you guys, but your account is on CIA levels of lockdown privacy, and Eddie never remembers to use his. So it wasn’t _ made _ to avoid you guys, it just ended up that way.” There’s the sound of the top of a tupperware container being snapped back on and Richie sighs deeply.

“Fine, yes. You can gossip about us to the Brady Bunch.”

“Oh? I really think—I don’t know. I feel like we have a more Partridge Family atmosphere.”

Standing back up, Richie can hear the bones in his body crack. “Whatever you have to tell yourself, man.”

He ends up brushing his teeth in a rush, dressing in one of the outfits he bought right off of the J. Crew mannequin, and throwing his hands through his hair in lieu of a brush before he leaves. It’s going to take him an hour to get to Eddie’s place in rush hour traffic, and he’s left himself with no time to spare.

Stan messages him on his way out.

_ Stan Uris: _ Can everyone else add you?  
_ Beep “Beep” Richard: _Yeah I mean what have I got to lose. I’m only a well known television personality and on the rise comedian.

Four friend requests pop up, one right after another.

—

Richie’s expectation of meeting Eddie in the lobby of his hotel is thrown off balance by the text he gets to _ come on up _ followed by a room number.

Eddie’s room is on the eighteenth floor and Richie expects him to open the door, say he’ll be just a minute, and then squeeze out into the hallway where Richie can explain to him that there are definitely bad Mexican places in LA and he will help him avoid them.

He has a whole monologue planned, truth be told.

That’s also thrown off balance when Eddie opens the door in a robe, has a glass of something already in hand, and just goes, “Come in,” before turning on his heel and leaving the door open.

Richie feels frozen in place for half a second, before reacting and following Eddie inside.

“Sorry for the mess,” Eddie says, gesturing towards a towel that’s on the floor.

“You should see my room,” Richie replies, watching with wide eyes as Eddie climbs up on the bed furthest from the door and falls against the pillows. He has his glass held aloft and looks practiced at doing so.

“If it’s anything like when we were kids, I think I’d have a goddamn panic attack in your room.”

While Eddie finishes whatever’s in his glass (scotch, maybe, or Fireball—there’s a selection on top of the minifridge), Richie glances around the room, taking stock of the situation. HGTV is playing on the television, the towel really is the only mess to speak of, and the rest of it is a typical hotel room. Nothing fancy.

He takes a seat on the other bed, facing Eddie and wondering what he’s doing here, because this isn’t dinner perse, and Eddie doesn’t look like he’s going to finish getting ready any time soon, if he ever started.

As if reading his mind, Eddie turns onto his side, props his head up on his hand and says, “You wanna just stay here?”

“Um.”

Richie doesn’t know what to say. He feels like he’s back in his first improv class, when he realized that being funny was harder when that’s what you were _ supposed _ to be doing. It was one thing to be the guy in the group who told jokes, another to stand out among a crowd of people who had all been that guy in their irrespective groups.

Now he’s sitting across from the person who was usually the butt of his jokes and the object of his—whatever, and Eddie looks good. He looks like Richie might have imagined he’d look at this age, if what they’d had would’ve lasted. He’s still short, but he’s filled out some, still has those eyes and that hair, black like night.

He still looks at Richie like he’s going to spit on him or hold him close. It’s a very specific combination and Richie understands it’s not everyone’s thing, but he’s starting to think it’s his _ only _ thing.

“Um,” he says again, while Eddie looks at him plaintively. “Can we order in?”

“Is there something about being with me that makes you feel like we’re fourteen again? Do you want to call your mom and get permission?” Eddie asks as he sits up and crawls across the bed in that too-short robe. It begs the question of how much drinking he’s already done tonight. 

And Richie wants to answer him, _ Yes, obviously, _because while it wasn’t easy being fourteen there was a natural ease to difficult situations when you had someone to shift the blame onto. And being with Eddie makes him crave that old security blanket, his old way out, and the way things used to be so simple.

“Kind of,” he manages to say, scratching at the side of his face. “I feel like I need to make sure I get her approval before we do anything.”

Eddie is wielding a room service menu now, sprawled out on his stomach on the bed. Richie feels a little sick looking at him because, God. Okay. He doesn’t know Eddie like he used to, but he still thinks he has a pulse on him enough to know that he wouldn’t be doing this if he wasn’t halfway drunk.

“Margherita pizza,” Eddie is mumbling one second, and then next he’s breathing heavily with his cheek against the menu, eyes closed.

Richie takes the liberty of ordering for the both of them.

—

When Eddie wakes up, Richie’s changed the channel and has just started eating.

“Wuh—how long was I asleep?” Eddie asks, looking dazed.

“Half an hour,” Richie replies, unable and unwilling to hide the soft smile on his face. He raises his plate. “Pizza.”

“Fuck yeah. Pizza,” Eddie agrees. He has lines on his face from the blanket he was laying on top of.

They eat without talking much, watching one of Richie’s favorite TV shows, which is a reality show on the Weather Channel about people who survive tornadoes. He’d probably pay the showrunners to be in one of the reenactment scenes. His agent would kill him, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t tempted to try and do it.

“That’s crazy,” Eddie says, when the episode ends. He’s under a blanket now, his body completely covered, and seems to have sobered up a little bit.

“See, the key is that they always go in the beer cooler at a gas station or a corner store. I don’t really understand why it’s safe in there, but nobody ever fucking dies in the beer cooler.”

Eddie nods and flops back against the pillows behind him. Richie is still sitting on the very edge of the other bed.

“Sorry.” The sound is muffled from where the collar of the robe is covering Eddie’s mouth.

“Hm?” Richie heard him, but pretends he didn’t.

“I said _ sorry._” Eddie wiggles around so his face is exposed. “I started drinking as soon as I got back to my room, so by the time you showed up…”

“Kinda gathered that.” He manages to keep the judgmental tone out of his voice, which feels like a minor miracle. It wouldn’t be fair. He’d just been planning for take two. Another run at yesterday night. “It’s fine. This feels more natural, anyway.”

“Yeah, like. If this show had existed when we were in ninth grade, we definitely would have watched it.”

“Oh, for sure. We’d have been prepared for the first ever tornado to hit Derry. We could’ve hid in Ben’s little fort in the woods. Just the seven of us and seven million spiders.” 

Eddie laughs at that in a way that makes Richie feel satisfied deep in his gut. It’s a familiar feeling, he felt it last night and he felt it twenty years ago, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever spend time with Eddie and _ not _ feel it.

He wonders if Eddie feels it, too.

—

They watch half of the next episode in silence before Eddie takes advantage of a commercial break and gathers up some clothes so he can change in the bathroom, during which time Richie smells his breath (firmly in marinara sauce territory, nothing he can do about that), and tries to position himself on the edge of the bed in a way that’s appealing.

Eddie comes back out in boxer shorts and an old band t-shirt and says, “Why are you sitting like that?”

“Like what?” Richie is caught between sitting cross-legged and leaning back, one foot still on the floor and the other underneath him.

“Like an idiot.” Eddie brushes past him and Richie thinks okay, yeah, he’s definitely an idiot. He’s averting his eyes from the sight of Eddie leaning over and unzipping his suitcase and not taking any of the hints being thrown his way. Like earlier when Eddie was sprawled out and tipsy, it just doesn’t feel right.

“How’s your girlfriend?” Before the words are even out of his mouth, Richie is wincing and clenching his right hand into a fist, nails biting at the meat of his palm. _ How’s your fucking girlfriend_. Yeah, that’s definitely what he wants to talk about.

Eddie doesn’t even answer him, just sighs and continues pulling things out of his suitcase. It looks like his toiletries, toothbrush and toothpaste, moisturizer, face wash, various pill bottles. Some things never change, the sun always rises in the east and sets in the west, etcetera.

“Sorry. If that’s a stupid question I can...I don’t know. Die.”

“Die?” Eddie spins around and brandishes the end of his toothbrush like a knife.

“We’re on the eighteenth floor so I’ll just, you know.” Richie mimes pushing the window open and then slaps his hands together. “Splat.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie says, wagging the toothbrush in his face. “If you say some dumb shit like that in front of me again I’ll kill you.”

Richie grins. He loves a good death threat from Eddie Kaspbrak. Feels like old times. “Noted.”

Eddie, with his arms full of what Richie assumes is his nightly bathroom routine, fights against smiling back and loses. “Whatever. My girlfriend is fine.” His voice falters on the last word and he starts walking hurriedly back to the bathroom.

“Yeah?” Richie rolls over onto his back. “Is she like...super hot?”

“Jesus. Yes, Richie, my girlfriend is super hot and that’s why I’m dating her.” Eddie’s voice is an echo and there’s the sound of water running. “You asked how she was and I don’t know what to say! She’s fine. She has enough energy to drive me nuts, anyway.”

Richie raises his eyebrows since there’s no one to see him do it. Interesting. “High energy is good in a relationship. Or so I’ve heard.”

“What the hell does _ that _ mean?” Eddie sticks his head out, mouth lined with toothpaste foam. “Sitting all weird and judging me over there, fuck off. You’re the one who’s single.”

It’s 50/50, whether that comment would have hurt coming from anyone else. As it is, Richie feels a mild amount of embarrassment that he shrugs off. He might have stalked Eddie’s girlfriend’s Facebook page a couple of weeks ago. In the last six months she’s been a bridesmaid in four weddings.

He really doesn’t envy that kind of pressure.

“You gonna marry her?” he asks, doing his best to sound casual. “I hear that’s the best way to get women to put out.”

“See, I don’t even _ have _ to kill you.” Eddie’s practically yelling over the water now and Richie can’t even guess what part of his routine he’s on. “You’re just going to say some stupid shit like that to a guy with anger management issues and a steroid addiction and he’s going to crush you like a bug.”

“I’m 6’2”.”

“A _ tall _ bug, then.”

They fall into an oddly comfortable silence, Eddie exfoliating and gargling water, and Richie kicking his shoes off and getting comfortable on the bed. The tornado show ended about ten minutes ago, and now there’s just a couple of anchors on talking about a hurricane that’s moving in over Corpus Christi.

Richie’s watching the yellow, orange, and red mass move inland off the Gulf when Eddie emerges from the bathroom, pink-faced and weirdly shiny.

For a fevered moment, Richie imagines that Eddie is going to curl up next to him and tell him about his day. He’s not sure why the thought strikes him, except for the fact that it would cause him immense relief if it were to happen.

It’s been a long time since he’s been anything approaching tactile in a relationship, and it’s a punch in the gut to realize the last time he laid in bed with anyone and enjoyed it was the early 90s, with Eddie’s back pressed against his chest. The realization is a heavy weight and he can barely concentrate on what Eddie’s saying to him as he slathers something from a jar all over his face.

“Um. Sorry—what?”

Eddie sighs again, but this time it’s distressingly fond. “I was just saying, I know you’re single right now, but is that a recent thing? Were you seeing anyone recently?”

Richie swallows down what he wants to say, this dumb, cheesy line—_I’ve never really seen anyone since you_—and instead says, “No, uh. I don’t think I’ve actually sat down and dated anyone in a couple of years. Too busy, you know. Shows and travelling and trying to stay relevant.”

“So, wait. That joke about your girlfriend walking in on you—”

“Yeah,” Richie draws the word out and directs his jazz hands at the ceiling. “That’s what we in the business call bullshit.”

“Oh, huh.”

Richie turns his head to see Eddie swiping white stripes underneath his eyes. He has no idea why, but it’s endearing. He wouldn’t have imagined him doing all these things after yesterday, and it feels intimate to be watching him do it now.

“That unsurprising, huh?” He kicks up a leg and rolls onto his side.

“Mmh.” Eddie glances at him before settling back on top of his own bed, cross legged and looking younger than he has any right to. “I mean, I know you, so. Yeah.”

“Fair. But you know, I _do_ get a lot of fans wanting to hook up, completely unaware of the worst thing about dating me, which is of course—”

“If you say your massive cock, I swear to God.”

“What am I supposed to say! I’m all about honesty, baby!”

It feels stupidly good to call Eddie that, though his only reaction is to roll his eyes and punch his own pillow before laying back down. The curtains are pulled closed and the room is shrouded in darkness aside from the glow of the television and Richie feels so comfortable being in this room that he starts to worry he’s crossed a line somewhere and is unaware of it.

“Hey,” he says, in a gentler voice than he means to. Eddie tilts his head to look at him. “Hey, um. I should probably get going, right?”

Eddie doesn’t move, just blinks and then clears his throat. “Do you have to?”

“I do have a job, too,” Richie reminds him, though it’s only just true. He has the prospect of jobs on the horizon, tour dates booked months in advance, and that embarrassingly empty Google doc waiting at home for him.

“I know you do.” Eddie turns on his side so they’re facing each other again and Richie wishes there wasn’t so much space between them. “Do you remember when I was freaked out over the final in Mrs. Roy’s class in tenth grade?”

“Vaguely. I remember that it didn’t make any sense to me because you were good at math.” Richie had often marveled at Eddie’s abilities to make sense of formulas and equations, strings of letters and numbers that made no more sense to him than an entire book in Mandarin Chinese would have.

He’d always done better in English class—not _ great_, but better—because he could talk himself into a right answer there. In math there was no such power of persuasion. Either you were right or you were wrong and Richie struggled with those absolutes while Eddie thrived under them.

“Well, maybe, but I was still freaked out and couldn't calm down. So our brilliant solution was to pool our money and buy weed from Stan’s cousin that ended up making me sick.”

“Oh fuck, that’s _ right_.” Richie hadn’t forgotten this memory in full, but the details were hazy. It’s only hearing Eddie say it that he remembers they were all scared he was going to die. Ben had been discussing possibly burial sights and Stan had been listing off potential convictions and jail time. “We thought it was laced with something. Although, honestly? It might have just been half-oregano.”

Eddie snorts. “That sounds right. All I know is, I couldn’t stop puking, which meant I couldn’t go home. So you snuck me into your house through the backdoor and I spent the night. And it was fine.”

“Did you pass the math test?”

“I don’t remember. Probably, but that’s not—Rich, that isn’t the point.” Eddie’s voice is weirdly small and distant, subdued in a way he rarely is. “I never forgot that whole thing, how I was out of my mind thinking I was going to die and you made it alright. You always made it alright. And when we started talking again I thought, okay. That was kid’s stuff. That..._feeling _ won’t still be there. But it is.”

Richie is watching the shadows play on the wall over Eddie’s bed. He can’t look him in the eye right now. “It’s still there for me, too, Eds.”

“Yeah? So what I’m trying to say, I guess, is can you stay the night?”

And Richie thinks, well. Who is he to say no.

—

They leave the hotel together in the morning, Eddie showered and dressed to impress and Richie in his rumpled button down and second-day underwear that he plans to shed the second he gets back to his place.

“You've got a meeting?” he asks as they wait on the sidewalk in the early morning light. He’s still so tired his eyes are burning at the edges, but it’s a hurt that feels worth it and earned.

“Oh, yeah.” Eddie has coffee from the cafe in the lobby, but he isn’t drinking it, just holding it and staring at the ground. “No big deal. Just deciding the fate of the company’s western expansion to the tune of several billion dollars in either gains or losses. I’ll be fine. What about you?”

“Me?” Richie rubs his cheek as a silver Corolla pulls up to the curb. “Same thing I guess, just on an individual scale. Might implode, might not, only time will tell.”

Eddie is already headed to the Corolla and Richie watches in confusion as he knocks against the passenger’s side window, waits for it to roll down, and then hands his coffee to the driver and asks him to wait for a second before turning around and heading back to Richie.

“What are—” is all he’s able to say before Eddie hugs him.

It’s not half-hearted or performative, it’s tight and close and sudden. They’re standing in front of a hotel, hugging in the early morning as people pass by with an Uber driver staring at them. Richie wishes it would last forever, his hands on Eddie’s back and Eddie’s face against his shoulder.

“Thanks for staying,” Eddie says, as he lets go and backs away.

“Any time,” Richie replies, feeling like the wind has been knocked out of him.

“I’ll call you.” Eddie holds his phone up and shakes it in his hand, as if to remind Richie about the concept of modern technology.

“Yeah. I’ll—me too.”

Richie watches him get in the car and get his coffee back, watches as the car pulls away, watches as the tail lights fade into the crush of cars travelling down the road.

He’s watched Eddie leave plenty of times and isn’t sure what it is about this time that cuts so deep.

—

Three months later, Richie is in the green room before a live appearance, looking at himself mouth words in the mirror and checking his teeth for food when his phone lights up.

_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ Do you have a sec?  
_ Beep “Beep” Richard: _ for you darling always

They haven’t talked much since they last saw each other, just messages here or there. Eddie seems busy with his hostile corporate takeover, or whatever it is he does, and Richie himself just got done with a west coast tour leg and a last minute guest appearance on a show that’s doing numbers.

He gets up and paces a little before checking his phone again.

_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ This is going to sound crazy and maybe is crazy. I don’t know. Do you need a roommate?  
_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ Of course you don’t need a roommate sorry ignore that. Do you want one? That’s what I’m asking. Do you want a roommate?  
_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ Okay to be extremely clear is there any possibility that I could be your roommate? In LA. Where you live.

Richie replies the only way he knows how.

_ Beep “Beep” Richard: _ dude idk how to tell you this but i live in santa monica  
_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ I’m literally going to kill you.  
_ Beep “Beep” Richard: _but i mean if you want to move to santa monica (where i live) i have a spare room if thats what you’re asking

Someone, he isn’t sure who, sticks their head in the green room and calls his name, telling him he’s on in sixty seconds. Richie fixes his hair in the mirror to the extent that it can be fixed, and checks his phone one last time.

_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ Fuck me for thinking this would be easy. But yeah, that’s what I’m asking.  
_ Beep “Beep” Richard: _ i’ll send you the details later in the meantime turn on nbc...maybe i'll say hi

Phone in his pocket, he heads out of the room, ready to smile for the cameras.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as promised: eddie, eddie, and more eddie.
> 
> regarding the timeline of this fic: since this is a non-supernatural au, they've come back together sooner than they do in canon. they're about 33-34 here and richie hasn't quite hit his mainstream popularity peak while eddie isn't married to myra yet. they still have time, baby.
> 
> hope you enjoyed and see you next time (alternatively say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/glamoursprings))!


	3. ii.

_ Your relationship with him is built out of questions you can only ask each other. _

_ Like: Where did you go when you went away? _

_ Like: What the fuck was up with you earlier?_

_ Like: If I tell you this thing about me that nobody knows, that I can’t tell anyone else, that I can’t even tell myself_—_will you still be my friend? _

_ Sometimes you think the whole thing is a glass house and that the cracks are starting to show, and sometimes you think that’s good. _

_ Because if it all falls apart and you don’t get the answers you want, maybe you’ll see the truth in his eyes and it will surprise you. Deep breath in, exhale, you’ve said it to the mirror a thousand times. _

_ Now just say it to him. _

—

Richie waits almost an hour at LAX’s arrival terminal for Eddie, playing a game of chicken between himself and his car’s heating system. On and off, on and off. It’s the beginning of January and he’s become weak since leaving Maine, shivering in fifty degree weather like the people who grew up here.

He bought himself a leather jacket for Christmas, which he initially felt was kind of a sad thing to do, but now he can’t stop talking about it. He realizes this has made him into the LA transplant who can’t stop talking about his leather jacket, but he feels so far from the person he used to be. The one who would have cared about coming off that way and consciously shut off the natural part of himself that adores inane, useless conversation and the way it makes the world turn.

In fact, the leather jacket was instrumental in joining the fabled group chat, a day which will live in infamy. Richie inundated everyone with close to a hundred dressing room mirror pictures in various poses, trying to find something that fit his style and really only paying attention to Beverly’s advice, because from what he can tell the rest of them dress like twice divorced dads attending parent-teacher conferences.

He found himself one hundred and seventy dollars poorer, but having gained back something he thought he lost a long time ago, which was the forced camaraderie of a lonely childhood. All of them so desperate for friends they settled for everyone else’s rejects, only to find out they fit together in a way that was eerily perfect.

Now he regularly messages Bev with morning outfits and courts her with the offer to be his stylist when he makes it big. He’s only half-joking.

His outfit today isn’t Beverly approved, but he did get a thumbs up emoji from Mike, of all people, when he asked if it was a good ‘welcome back, dude’ outfit. He thinks that’s a good sign, but also feels there’s a significant chance he looks like someone you’d ask about the latest John Grisham novel.

Whatever the case, Eddie doesn’t even seem to notice what he’s wearing when he finally pulls open the passenger door and spits out a staccato, “Sorry. Fuck. Who designed this place and how much coke did they take before doing it? It’s a fucking maze. JFK is a nightmare too, but at least it has _ some _ semblance of structure.”

“Hi, Eddie,” Richie says, feeling the fondness bloom in his chest like an errant firework, the sudden burst of light and the way it spirals up into the open sky leaving him momentarily dizzied.

On the drive back to Richie’s apartment (which is now, he guesses, _ their _ apartment) Eddie fills him in on the fact that he drank three sodas on the plane and watched half of a movie Bill’s girlfriend is in, which he apparently didn’t like even though he told Bill he did.

“I accidentally told him my favorite part was the ending, which didn’t go over great since Audra is killed by the swamp monster in the last scene,” Eddie admits as he reaches into the backseat to unzip the front pocket of his suitcase and pull out a thing of what looks like hand cream.

“I actually went to the premiere,” Richie says, thinking that will sound grown up and indicative of his level of professional connections, even though he only went because he had nothing better to do.

“Jesus Christ, that’s depressing!” Eddie’s hand cream smells like peppermint and makes Richie want to gag in the immediate aftermath of him using it. “Have you asked them to send you to, I don’t know, _ good _ movie premieres?”

“Fuck I didn’t think of that, Eds. I’m writing that down.”

The introduction to the apartment building goes about as expected, with Eddie staring at the size of his bedroom for a full minute before turning on his heel and saying it’s actually bigger than his master back home.

Richie spent upwards of six hours cleaning the room out last weekend, shuffling records into storage and filling trash bags all the way up. He’s well aware of the scope of the room, and of the fact that he’s lost a nicely sized, ocean-view office even if he’s gained an Eddie in exchange.

“Do you want to get something to celebrate?” he asks, stupidly delighted by the whole process.

He’s having far too much fun with this, he’s aware. He’s even excited for Eddie’s stuff to start arriving by snail mail, the boxes full of clothes and favorite coffee mugs and finicky, good-smelling toiletry items. The idea of unpacking them together makes him think of the most dangerous word he could possibly apply to this entire situation, the way it would trip off his tongue clumsily if he ever had the courage to say it out loud. Domesticity.

“Celebrate?” Eddie is doing a sort of flight of fancy, running his hands over the white laminate countertops in the kitchen and opening some of the cupboards. Richie feels anxious that he’ll scoff at what he’s got in the fridge so he hovers in its general vicinity as if protecting it from Eddie’s roaming hands and discerning tastes.

“Yeah,” he says, rocking back and forth as he has a self-conscious moment where he realizes how much he’s talking with his hands. They’re flying all over the place. “Your promotion?”

“Oh.” That stops Eddie in his tracks. “It’s more of a lateral move, just with significantly more weight on my shoulders. But a celebration for being _ here _ sounds good. What were you thinking?”

“Ice cream? There’s a place in Alhambra with a lavender flavor.”

“That sounds disgusting,” Eddie says, but he’s already pulling his jacket back on.

Richie grins. His face hurts from smiling. “Noted.”

“I definitely want to try some, but only if you order it and let me have half.”

“Obviously.”

Richie grabs his keys and his leather jacket and runs mini laps around Eddie as they head for the front door, babbling about other places they need to go to in the coming weeks. He makes sure to lock the door behind them and finds himself marveling at the sudden normalcy of it all. The two of them leaving their apartment together, Eddie’s voice shrill in the January air and his own cheeks flushed in excitement.

There’s a point that night when Eddie’s got ice cream on his upper lip and Richie thinks, feverishly, that he could lick it off. That Eddie might let him do it.

Imagining about how easy it would have been keeps him up at night.

—

Two weeks in and Eddie is already swamped with cascades of manila envelopes and phone calls from three hours into the future. He sometimes speaks conversational Spanish in the early hours of the morning when Richie is half-asleep, wandering to the bathroom.

Richie is comfortable in boxers and socks and t-shirts with holes in the armpits, while Eddie seems incapable of existing in anything less than a polo shirt and pressed slacks, a coffee cup in hand. They’re operating on completely different schedules with dissimilar amounts of energy. Eddie is frenetic and precise while Richie is the type of procrastinator who has learned exactly how much time he can let pass before he needs to leap headfirst into crunch mode.

At the moment he’s comfortable waking up late and eating breakfast for lunch, scrambled eggs at one in the afternoon in a quiet apartment and saying, “Honey, you’re home,” when Eddie stumbles through the door in the evenings.

“I’m going crazy,” Eddie whines on a Wednesday, his head in his hands as he leans over the kitchen counter. “I live with you now and I don’t even see you! What’s the point.”

Richie’s heart pangs at that, even though he knows it isn’t meant in the way he wants it to be. That somehow temporarily moving out here was to see _ him _ and not for the work opportunity.

“You wanna watch me play video games?” he asks, waving a PS4 controller in the air, to which Eddie makes an excited little noise.

Richie’s heart also pangs at that, for a different reason.

They settle in with snacks and Richie offers to let Eddie play every ten minutes before Eddie admits he wouldn’t even know where to start.

“Myra doesn’t like video games,” he mumbles, shrinking in on himself. “She thinks they’re stupid and violent and that only stupid and violent people play them.”

“She’s got me there,” Richie says, aiming for a headshot on the zombie that’s shambling around the wooded area he’s currently in while simultaneously avoiding Eddie kicking at his shin.

“No. It’s dumb. But I haven’t really played anything newer than, I don’t know. There was a Legend of Zelda game I had in college that I liked—“

He’s cut off by his work phone ringing, the annoying factory default ringtone jingling from the kitchen.

Richie’s got his finger on the pause button. “You gotta get that, right?”

Eddie groans as he gets up and Richie can feel himself deflate, ready to just pack up and head into his room by himself. Then he watches Eddie decline the call, turn off the ringer, and drop the phone into his messenger bag.

He plops down onto the coach next to Richie again, their shoulders touching, and squirms against him until he’s settled.

“What the fuck are you doing? I want to see what happens.”

Richie, heart pounding in his chest like a drum as he smiles like an idiot, unpauses the game.

—

There’s an empty afternoon where he gets bored and calls Beverly on a whim, needing something else to do so he can stay focused on cleaning his bedroom. The urge to clean strikes him so rarely, he has to take advantage of it when it does, riding the wave of disgust with his own surroundings until he can stand his living space once more.

She’s seemingly more than happy to humor him, warning him only that she’s in the middle of replenishing her wardrobe basics, a concept so alien to him that he has her explain it to him twice before it settles in and they’re able to move on to something he can wrap his head around. Dentist appointments and airport anxiety and all the ways in which their lives have evolved over miles and days spent apart.

“There’s this guy named Tom I’ve gone out with a few times,” she’s saying, her voice funny and echoing off the walls due to him having her on speaker.

“I hate to judge someone by their name but—Tom?” Richie has a garbage bag held open as he loads discarded napkins and week-old paper plates into it. “I feel like you deserve better than _ Tom. _”

Her laugh is disarmingly awkward on the other end of the line, which makes him pause. “You know what’s weird?” She pauses and he waits. “He kind of reminds me of my dad.”

“Oh fuck that.” Richie stops what he’s saying and grabs the phone so he can speak directly into it. “Dump that piece of shit. Ghost him for all I care. That’s exactly the kind of thing you should run away from.”

She’s quiet for so long after that he worries her call dropped or, worse yet, that he took it too far. But then she says, “You’re right. I shouldn’t...I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“No, no,” his voice softens as he sits on the edge of his bed and stares at the records he has affixed to his wall. _ Tinderbox _ is right at eye level currently. “Bev, no. It happens to everyone. I don’t think less of you. I just don’t want to have to hunt the piece of shit down and kill him with you, even if it would make a great revenge flick.”

Her next peel of laughter is more genuine and relaxed, which makes his shoulders slump in relief. “I call shotgun, if we ever do go on a revenge road trip.”

“If it’s not to take fucking _ Tom _ out we can always head back to Maine,” he says, dropping his phone back onto his bed and heading back to work.

Beverly hums in agreement at that and Richie has sudden idea that they all need to get together again in the coming years, head back home and group up and—well, he isn’t sure what they’d do together. But something. The thought is like a shot to his head, a bullet in his brain, the kind of thing he never saw coming and that hurts now that it's lodged deep.

Before he can say anything about it though, Beverly is asking, “How’s Eddie?”

Richie blinks himself out of his stupor and has to pause before he can piece together a good answer. “Buried under white collar paperwork and the pressure to get down on one knee sometime soon. Eating enough trail mix for a small family of chipmunks on a daily basis. But otherwise good.”

“Slight tangent, but what do you think about a bottle green blouse?”

“I’d have to Google to see what bottle green is, but I can’t imagine you’d look bad in anything, really.” Richie is turning in circles to try and center himself, hoping when he stops he'll land on the right thing to do. He ends up facing his bedside table, which is a mess of half-full water bottles, strewn pills, and unread books. As good a place as any.

“I’m going to try it on,” Bev says decisively, before adding, “Is she really still pressuring him about getting engaged?”

“Yeah, his girlfriend—I don’t know how to say it nicely. She seems kind of...terrible?”

“Mmh.” Richie hears a door clickclosed. “I’ve never spoken to her but she comes off as very controlling. I’m surprised she even let him move out there with you.”

“It’s only for three months,” Richie reminds her, by way of reminding himself. He’s constantly having to do it, because Eddie being here feels horribly right. They’re like two magnets, equal parts opposed and pulled together depending on which way they’re facing at any given time.

There’s always _ something _ between them.

“Right, but...have you seen the way she talks about him on Facebook?”

Richie has and, more than that, he’s borne witness to their phone conversations on a regular basis. The other night he got so annoyed he laid back on the couch and played dead, eyes rolled back mouth wide open. Eddie just gave him the finger and said something like: _ No honey of course I’m listening, I don’t have anything more important to do than talk to you all night. _

In Richie’s admittedly biased opinion, Eddie spends the phone calls bored to tears and answers with more enthusiasm when his project manager calls him from work. He’s considered breaking into Eddie’s phone and changing Myra’s ringtone to a funeral dirge, but Eddie bought a new kitchen knife set a week and a half ago and Richie doesn’t want to give him reason to use it on anything besides vegetables.

“Yeah but...I mean, he’s an adult. He’s thirty-fucking-three. He can make a decision for himself.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong about that. Check your texts by the way, I took a picture of the top.”

Richie does. She’s copying one of his leather jacket poses in the picture, throwing up a peace sign and sticking out her tongue in a way that makes him wish he was there and could hug her.

“Dare I say my dear, bottle green might just be your color,” he simpers into the phone, doing a voice that’s caught between a stuffy butler and a Jane Austen character.

“Oh, shut up,” she says, but he can hear the smile in her voice. “You’re right about Eddie. He can make decisions for himself. Whether or not he usually does...the jury’s still out on that one.”

Richie chews on the inside of his cheek and looks at the state of his room, which has been blown apart. He has a lot of work to do.

“Well,” he says, “maybe that needs to change.”

—

There’s a point in February during which Richie has three auditions in one week and back-to-back meetings with two different agents who are trying to poach him. It’s the only time in his life that he’s felt like a hot commodity and he allows himself to bask in it a little longer than is probably necessary.

“I’m not famous,” he explains to Eddie one morning when he hasn’t gone to sleep and Eddie has just gotten up and is brushing his teeth with his electric toothbrush. It lights up bright red whenever he presses down too hard, which is often. “I’m just...like a bee. There’s _ buzz_.”

“Mmmhm,” Eddie says. To be fair, it’s really the only thing he can say before he spits out the foam in his mouth.

“I mean, who’d have thought,” Richie says, as if he didn’t spend a significant chunk of his childhood imagining this very thing. “Little old me!”

“Can ‘little old me’ pass me a towel?” Eddie asks, outstretching a hand and waiting for Richie to pass him one of the hand towels from the minuscule linen closet that has no right to exist in the space that it does. “That’s great though, Rich. I just wonder what you’ll do when they figure out I wrote all your best material.”

They meander through a morning routine that has become normal, Eddie making breakfast while Richie floats ideas for jokes he’s workshopping. If Eddie scrunches up his nose, he has work to do, but if he purses his lips over his coffee Richie knows he’s mad that something is actually funny and that’s _ always _ a keeper.

He’s got a sort of free flowing string of childhood jokes he’s working on currently, lambasting Maine as a concept.

“I mean, seriously, name _ three _ factual things about Maine and I’ll pay you,” Richie says, sitting at the kitchen island and laying over the counter top as his eyes burn with exhaustion.

“As a state we supply ninety percent of the country’s lobster supply,” Eddie offers.

“_We_?” Richie pretends to gag.

Eddie just raises his voice. “We were the first state to ban alcohol back in the 1800s _ and_...the state bird is the black-capped chickadee.”

“Shut the fuck up, it is not.” Richie feels offended, but he’s also pulled his phone out and is typing this all into his Notes app. “You just talk to Mike too much.”

“There’s no such thing as talking to Mike too much.” Eddie sets down his coffee mug and pointedly crosses his arms. “He’s a delightful person. Unlike some other people from Derry that I could name.”

“Oh, excuse me for not being delightful,” Richie says, lilting his voice upwards into a _ Downton Abbey_-esque accent on the last word.

“There’s only six people I give a shit about from Maine and you’re one of them. I’m not talking about you,” Eddie says, turning around to gather his jacket and messenger bag like he hasn’t just said something that’s going to roll around in Richie’s head like a runaway pinball for the next couple of hours.

“That’s real sweet of you, Eds,” is what he ends up saying in response, which isn’t even the half of it.

Once Eddie’s gone he heads to his room and crawls into bed, telling himself he’s going to get to work after a cat nap.

He ends up sleeping the day away and when he wakes up, Eddie is cross legged on the end of his bed, watching television and eating something that smells minty.

“Huh?” He tries to sit up and tells himself that maybe he’s imagining this, but the weight at the end of the bed tells him he’s not.

“You were asleep,” Eddie says, by way of explanation. He’s got on grey sweatpants and a t-shirt and looks less put together than Richie has seen him ever since they’ve been living in the same apartment. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“You’re not—you wouldn’t have. Um.” Richie’s mouth is dry and his head is pounding. He wonders if he’s getting sick or if it’s just Eddie’s proximity to him. There’s something about being this close to him right after waking up that’s messing with Richie’s brain.

“If you want to go back to bed, be my guest.” The cellophane around whatever Eddie is eating crinkles and Richie lays back down. He couldn’t go back to sleep if he tried.

“Tell me about what you’re watching,” he says, closing his eyes.

Eddie launches into an explanation that Richie is barely listening to. Instead he does his best to memorize the heights and valleys of Eddie’s voice, the way he says certain words, and what it sounds like when he's passionate about what he’s telling you.

At one point Richie mumbles, “That’s great.”

Eddie laughs nervously. “I mean, yeah. If you think the processing of grief over a considerable amount of time in an extremely unhealthy way is..._great_.”

“I do.”

Eddie keeps talking, not seeming to care about whether or not what he’s saying is being heard and Richie turns so that he’s facing him, his shin against Eddie’s thigh.

Neither of them moves away.

—

They take turns getting takeout for dinner. Eddie actually leaves the apartment daily and likes to pick up salad bowls from a crunchy vegan place that Richie has never felt brave enough to go into alone. Richie is a fan of good old, reliable Chinese, which Eddie complains about even though he reliably eats the leftovers the next day, every time.

So Richie’s feeling good with a quart of chicken fried rice and egg rolls in a bag when he comes home to a dark apartment on a Thursday evening, riding the high of a successful guest role table read that went on longer than he expected.

The darkness at 7 PM is out of character because Eddie operates like clockwork. He gets up at five in the morning, showers, works all day, and gets home at six in the evening. That’s every day, Monday through Friday, barring the occasional late night that he always texts Richie about as he gets increasingly worked up throughout.

Last week he sent Richie ten Tyra Banks gifs in a row, labeling each one as a coworker. Richie said, _ okay but which tyra gif are YOU? _ and Eddie sent back one of her fainting.

But his most recent text to Richie was earlier this afternoon complaining about the lack of anti-bacterial soap in the bathrooms, so he’s pretty sure this isn’t another Tyra meltdown situation. He leaves the food on the counter and heads down the hallway to knock on Eddie’s door, only hesitating when he sees it’s open by a few inches.

Eddie doesn’t really do half-measures. His bedroom door is either closed or its open.

“Eds?” Richie is careful to whisper as he nudges the door with his shoulder. He can see the shape of Eddie’s body now, facedown on the bed and still fully dressed except for his shoes which are laying haphazardly on the floor instead of neatly next to the door, like they usually are.

Eddie makes a sound that’s muffled by his pillow and pushes himself up so that he’s sitting against the wall. “Sorry. I’m up. What is it?”

“Um, nothing.” Richie leans against the door frame, his eyes adjusting to the dark enough for him to see that Eddie looks rundown and ragged. Like maybe he’s been crying. “I got dinner. Are you...okay?”

“No, yeah. I’m fine, obviously,” Eddie says, his voice wobbling on the last word. He manages a deep breath in before he crumples like a fistful of plastic, his face falling into his hands. “_Fuck_.”

Richie stands still for half a second before he walks into the room and gestures at the bed. “This spot taken?”

Eddie hiccups out something that might be a laugh and nods and Richie goes to him, settling down so that they’re sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the shadows. He doesn’t say anything, just lets Eddie slump against him and shake, the hum of the city behind them like it always is, louder for their silence tonight.

After a couple of minutes, Eddie straightens up and seems to snap back into focus.

“I’m just so fucking tired,” he says, rubbing at one of his eyes with the heel of his hand. “She started talking to me about bridesmaid dresses and I just...lost it.”

“Bridesmaid dresses.” Richie doesn’t like the way those words sound or how they taste in his mouth. “Did you, uh, did you propose and not tell me?”

“No! Jesus, no. If I had then I’d get it. But she’s planning for a wedding that isn’t going to happen and I—” Eddie stops abruptly, mouth falling shut with a click as he realizes what he just said.

Richie, unsure of what else to do, presses against Eddie and says, “I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a Freudian slip in person before.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie mumbles, with nothing behind it. No piss, no vinegar. He doesn’t move away.

“I’m actually kind of impressed,” Richie admits, looking out towards the doorway and pretending he doesn’t feel Eddie’s eyes on him. “Really, I mean. I’ve known for a while. I’ve just been waiting for you to say it.”

“Known what?”

“Seriously, Eddie, are you gonna make me say it?”

Neither of them moves for what feels like an entire minute, the whole of the situation like a man on a tightrope a thousand miles above a city. Any move could spell disaster.

“No,” Eddie finally says, voice cracking. “I’m not. But Rich, I do—I do love her. Or I don’t want to hurt her, I guess. Is it crazy if I don’t know the difference? I can’t...I can’t separate the two in my mind. I fucking hate seeing her cry.”

Richie is slow to bring up his next point, precarious as the air is between the two of them. “I’m going to say something that’s a little fucked up, but um. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were talking about your mom.”

Eddie takes in a shuddering breath that Richie can feel the fathomless depth of. “I feel like I’m going to be sick.”

Richie doesn’t feel completely in control of his body. It’s like it’s moving on autopilot as he puts his arm around Eddie’s shoulder and pulls him closer. “I think that’s probably a normal response.”

“I’m not _ stupid._” Eddie leans against him, chin on Richie’s chest. His words are vibrations, a song that’s lodged itself in between Richie’s ribs. “I know people think I am, but I’m not. I’m aware of what it looks like and what it probably is. And I know I can’t keep going on like this, it’s just. What else am I supposed to do?”

“Well, I hate to burst any bubble you had about me being an unbiased relationship guru,” Richie says, relishing in the way Eddie weakly giggles against him, “but I feel like if your girlfriend is doing things you’re uncomfortable with, and you feel miserable and crazy in your relationship with her you’re supposed to dump her.”

Eddie goes still and Richie worries for half a second that he’s hurt him, that he should have kept that to himself, that it isn’t his place.

Then Eddie sighs heavily. “It’s kind of a relief. To hear you say that, I mean.”

“Yeah?” From this distance Richie can count Eddie’s eyelashes, can see the freckles he pretends aren’t on the tops of his cheeks. He wants to scream. He doesn’t want to let go. He isn’t sure what to do and he’s starting to realize he never has been.

“No one else will. I mean I’ve never...been like this in front of everyone else.” Richie isn’t sure what Eddie’s referring to—the crying, the raw emotional honesty, the clinginess—but it hardly matters. “Maybe they don’t think it’s that bad or something. But all I hear is that I should stick it out and, you know, that’s just how women are.”

“Dude that is _ not _ just how women are,” Richie says, feeling sick at the idea. “I’ve literally had some of the stupidest breakups of all time, and I’ve never had a girlfriend like that. She’s just...I’m sorry to say this man, but she sounds like a terrible person. Full stop.”

“Yeah,” Eddie croaks, like he’s biting back a sob. “But I have to think about it. We’ve been together since college.”

“That’s fine, I get it,” Richie says even though it isn’t and he doesn’t. He’s never had a problem ending things with any of his girlfriends and it’s only recently that he’s started to think that says something about him. He’s not sure if Eddie’s _ inability _to get out of this situation says the same thing or not.

It’s hard for the both of them to fit on the full mattress in Eddie’s room that night, but they do, laying next to each other and staring at the shadows on the ceiling.

“Remember when you’d sleep over and we’d sleep on the couch in the basement?” Richie asks, imagining the scene in his mind. The couch was a pumpkin orange color and they were always covered in knitted blankets as they watched movies they weren’t supposed to be watching.

Eddie makes an indignant noise in the back of his throat. “Uh, yeah, Richie. We watched _ Nightmare on Elm Street _ and I was traumatized for months afterwards, how could I forget! It was probably the only thing my mom was ever right about, telling me watching that stuff would fuck me up.”

“It still led to the best Halloween costume of all time,” Richie protests, vaguely remembering that they’d stolen his sister’s makeup and drawn on Eddie’s face for close to two hours before deciding they didn’t even want to go to the party they were only half-invited to. They’d all crowded into Richie’s basement and started the vicious cycle all over again, Mike dressed as Luke Skywalker and Stan as a zombie in his old baseball uniform.

“Eddie Krueger, yeah. I mean, the pun worked.” Eddie hiccups out a little laugh and then Richie does too and then they can’t stop laughing at how dumb it was, at how stupid they were at fourteen years old.

And Richie can’t help but remember that it wasn’t funny at the time. Halloween that year lived on a weird sort of cusp. Too old to be trick or treating, but not cool enough to feel like they belonged at parties. Eddie clawing at his arm as they watched _ The Thing_. Richie caught between knowing and not knowing what it meant that he wanted to pull Eddie closer in that moment.

It had been confusing, delirious, and only just the beginning.

Sort of like now.

He’s nearing his mid-thirties and laying in a too-small bed with the only man he’s ever allowed himself to feel anything more than friendship towards. He’s still wrestling with admitting that to himself. He feels sick to his stomach with want and longing, having convinced himself for twenty years that it was a fluke, that the feeling of Eddie’s face under his fingertips was something he’d be able to find with someone else.

“You were my best friend,” Eddie says quietly. “In every way that counted.”

“In every way that didn’t,” Richie replies. He means for it to sound lighthearted, but it comes out heavy and weighted. He wonders what he would see if he looked towards Eddie just now. If Eddie’s eyes would be wide and fearful or decidedly calm for once in his life. It scares him to imagine what he might see if turned to look.

So he doesn’t.

—

Richie only remembers it’s his birthday when he gets home and barely makes it through the doorway before Eddie yells, “Surprise!”

It’s certainly a surprise, though not at all a surprise _ party_, since no one is there besides Eddie, who still looks dressed for work if Richie ignores the ridiculous hat on his head. He’s gone to the trouble of getting a ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ banner that he’s strung up over the television and some generic party favors that he’s strewn around.

It’s endearing mostly because Richie is sure he agonized over every bit of it seeming spontaneous and fun.

They end up sitting at the kitchen table for the first time months, eating store-bought cake with plastic forks. Richie puts on a hat, too, drinking and laughing his way through bad retellings of both of their meetings today.

Richie spent his afternoon finalizing venue accommodations and shaking hands with tour managers and Eddie spent his dialing in on spreadsheets with the accounting department. Richie still doesn’t understand Eddie’s job, but gets that it’s tangentially connected to start up companies and consolidation firms, a world in which twelve hour days are normal and no one ever sleeps.

At one point, Eddie slips into his room saying he forgot something important and then comes back with a box wrapped so nicely Richie doesn’t feel right ripping the paper off.

“Seriously, have you been practicing?” he asks as he gingerly untapes one side. “I seem to remember most of my birthday presents coming wrapped in newspaper back in the day.”

“Am I better now at wrapping presents than I was when I was in high school? Is that what you’re asking?” Eddie scrunches his nose over the top of his beer bottle. “Yeah, Rich, I'd like to think I am.”

Richie giggles helplessly at that, half-drunk and fully aware by now that Eddie still makes him weak in the knees like a second grader with his first crush. Everything he says, no matter how unfunny, is funny. It’s just the way things work.

Inside the wrapping paper is a white box with an embossed logo on it that’s been taped shut. Inside that is a cobalt-colored scarf that’s so soft Richie almost can’t believe it.

“Um,” is all he can say, because he’s pretty sure something like this isn’t cheap.

“Do you like it?” Eddie asks, radiating nervous energy like some kind of nuclear disaster zone.

Richie doesn’t have to be asked twice. He takes the opportunity to wind it around his neck. “I _ love _ it.”

Eddie’s smile is smug and satisfied, very cat got the cream. It makes Richie wish a lot of things were different between them and that just as many things were the same.

“I realize it’s almost summer and practically always is here, but I know you travel, so.” Eddie has begun peeling the label off his beer bottle with a strange intensity. “I figured you’d get some use out of it yet and it’s...nice. It’ll last you.”

“Thank you,” Richie says, feeling it’s the least he can say and also halfway through Googling the scarf’s brand under the table. “I can wear it next month in New York.”

“Jesus, that reminds me. Your other surprise! Which isn’t exactly a present.” Eddie’s got the entire label off now, just scratching at the adhesive that’s still stuck to the bottle with his nails.

“Oh?” Richie is trying not to choke on his own words because he is now relatively sure Eddie spent almost five _ hundred _ dollars on the scarf he’s currently wearing.

“At the end of my meeting today I got asked to stay behind by my project manager and she was saying—well, they think I should stick around for another three months to a year to ensure continuity of services provided,” Eddie says, speaking so fast Richie feels like he misses every other word.

Somehow what he’s being asked still sinks in.

“So I was wondering,” Eddie continues, keeping his eyes on the bottle and not even noticing that Richie’s head is spinning, “if I could come with you to New York on your tour, and you could help me break up with Myra.”

Richie’s got a scarf worth a fifth of their monthly apartment rent around his neck and a children’s birthday hat on his head, he’s got five sold out shows to put on in less than a month’s time, and he’s got Eddie Kaspbrak looking at him with puppy dog eyes, big and wide and pleading.

What else can he say except, “Let’s dump that bitch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a belated but much earned thanks to [synthetica](https://archiveofourown.org/users/synthetica/pseuds/synthetica), who's help with editing makes this fic what it is. ♡
> 
> and thank you to everyone who's read and commented so far, excited to hear what you guys think about this one!


	4. iii.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> general warning: this chapter gets heavy with compulsory heterosexuality as well as emotional abuse and manipulation in a romantic relationship. take care if these topics are difficult for you.

_ You tell him in the only way you know how, as a joke. _

_ He doesn’t laugh and your first kiss tastes like vanilla ice cream. _

_ It’s stupid, giddy young love. You’re over the moon and up in the clouds and you know you’re being ridiculous, you know this can’t last under the sky of a small town. But you walk home that night like nothing can hurt you and you sleep that night without dreaming. _

_ It’s only in the morning when he doesn’t show up at your front door like always that you start to think that maybe somewhere along the way you missed something. _

_ You’re not sure where the past year went or what changed in that time but it’s the summer of 1990 and you’re going to spend it alone. _

—

It’s a five hour flight. Arms pressed up against each other all the way through as they watch terrible movies and make quiet conversation. When they land, Eddie leads the way towards baggage claim with the practice of a man who flies for work.

They arrive at their hotel a little after seven, Richie throwing his suitcase bodily on the bed closest to the bathroom and flopping down onto the pillows without even bothering to take his shoes off.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” Eddie asks, sounding wired. He has a strange tendency to feed off the energy of long days. When Richie raises his head up to look at him, he’s smoothing his shirt down in the mirror and running a hand through his hair uselessly.

“Hm? I mean, yeah. Give me a second.”

It’s more like five minutes as Richie peels himself off the bedspread, grabs a bag from the front pocket of his suitcase and heads to the bathroom. With the door closed he brushes his teeth and pops a couple Adderall, washing them down with water from the sink. The lighting in the bathroom is yellow and it makes him look sallow and jaundiced. He mimics Eddie, running a hand through his hair and attempts a smile in the mirror.

He’s with Eddie, he tells himself. He can do this. He has to.

Eddie is excited to show him some place called Gran Morsi, describing their pizza in a way that makes Richie wish he _ was _ the pizza. The place is apparently in walking distance of their hotel, and it’s cold enough that he has the scarf Eddie gave him wrapped around his neck. At one point when they’re waiting for a light to change, Eddie reaches out and grabs the end of it, rubbing the fabric between his fingers.

“What?” Richie feels his cheeks flush in stark contrast to the cold air around them.

“Nothing,” Eddie replies, with a strange smile on his face.

When the light changes, Eddie pulls Richie toward the street by the scarf before letting go.

Gran Morsi turns out to be a quaint restaurant set among a block of quaint restaurants, with low lighting and the smell of spices in the air.

Eddie requests a table upstairs in a way that makes Richie raise his eyebrows. He’s never actually seen Eddie like this before, confidently navigating a space like this. Most of their life in LA has been the other way around, with Eddie only really taking charge when he orders and rattles off his allergies. Here, he seems to be in his element.

“I have to do this for work a lot,” Eddie says, shrugging off his coat and motioning for Richie to do the same so he can hang them up on the coat rack that’s tucked in the corner by the front door.

“What, go on first dates?” Richie asks before he can stop himself.

Eddie doesn’t correct him, just shrugs. “Kind of. With new clients and stuff, yeah. Apparently I’m charming, when I want to be.”

Richie chokes on a laugh, because he can’t imagine—well, actually he can. He’s seen Eddie do it on the phone a couple of times. It’s like a light switch being flipped, Eddie going full customer service voice and asking about the person on the other end’s kids by name. On the other hand, he’s also watched Eddie hang up and yell _ fuck you _ before throwing his phone on the couch.

“No, I mean you’re totally charming,” Richie says, dodging out of the way as Eddie attempts to punch him in the sternum. “See like right now you’re being so charming. I’m—_ow_—I’m so fucking charmed, dude.”

They’re led up the stairs to a table that Richie initially thinks is dangerously close to the kitchen, but which Eddie assures him is the best spot in the house. Eddie also takes care of ordering, picking out a red wine and pizza after only glancing at the provided menus. Richie asks for a coloring page and crayons and Eddie tells the waitress to ignore him, but she brings them by anyway.

“I hate you so much,” Eddie says, sipping at his water as Richie starts doing the word search.

“Every feeling you have for me, I have for you, only magnified by a billion,” Richie replies, circling OREGANO in purple.

Eddie is quiet for a second before he says, “Second date.”

“Hm?”

“If you want to be accurate, this is our second date.”

Richie’s hand slows. He was in the middle of spotting PEPPERONI in the mish-mash of letters. “There’s only been two?”

“Well there was the sushi place, but since I moved in we haven’t purposefully gone out together.” Eddie is rearranging things on the table, moving the salt and pepper shakers and carefully handling the parmesan. “And, I don’t know. I was dating Myra at the time so maybe _ this _is the first date?”

“Eds.” Richie drops his crayon and reaches out to still Eddie’s hands with his own. “I think maybe we can worry about that when you actually end things with her, yeah?”

Eddie swallows audibly and refuses to look up from the table. “Yeah, no, that’s smart. But I’m not crazy, right? I’m not imagining _ this_, am I?”

Under Richie’s hands, Eddie’s are tremulous.

“You’re not,” Richie says with as much resolve as he can scrape from the bottom of his own shaken barrel. “And now I need to ask you an incredibly serious question. Do you...want to help me with this word search?”

They finish the word search around the time the pizza and Cabernet Sauvignon arrive, the red wine in particular setting Eddie greatly at ease. Richie watches as he downs his first glass in a couple of furious gulps.

The pizza is excellent, covered in chilies and fresh mozzarella and with a heavy, spicy sauce underneath it all. Richie allows the conversation to turn to the mundane, easily following Eddie’s train of thought from his plans to buy a car to the place on his neck where he nicked himself shaving to his opinions on morning talk radio.

“No one listens to morning talk radio anymore, is the thing.” Richie’s gotten through half a glass of wine and Eddie’s had three, working on four.

“Right, right, right,” Eddie says, slurring the words together as he leans across the table and points at Richie’s clavicle. “And I’m telling you _ why _ that is.”

“Okay, let me see if I understand it all.” Richie pushes the last piece of pizza across the plate to Eddie, who grabs it without hesitation. “It sounds like people aren’t listening to morning talk radio because...it’s bad?”

“_Yes_.” Mouth full of pizza, Eddie looks proud of himself. “That’s exactly it!”

Richie passes him napkins and can’t mask the fondness in his voice as he says, “You know, I think you might be right.”

By the time they’re ready to leave, Eddie is well past tipsy and careening into drunk territory. He needs Richie’s help to get his jacket on and shakes hands with their waitress. Richie slips her a fifty for putting up with them and mouths _ for the crayons _ at her before they head out the door.

Outside they’re hit with painful gusts of wind that are sweeping down the city’s sidewalks. Richie pulls his scarf over his mouth and does the unthinkable, offering a gloved hand to Eddie which Eddie takes in kind with a delighted little laugh.

“You like me,” Eddie says, squeezing their hands together.

“I tolerate you,” Richie lies through his teeth, “there’s a difference.”

“Mmhm.”

The walk is quiet even though there are people all around having conversations of their own. It all feels like background noise. Richie’s mind tunes everything else out and only listens to his and Eddie’s footfalls, to the way their breathing has synced up and to the way Eddie sighs to himself every other minute.

He doesn’t know if it’s the pills he took earlier or if it’s the way his chest burns at the thought of doing this every day, but he can’t think about anything else but the two of them with their hands intertwined, anonymous to everyone around them.

When they reach their hotel lobby the warmth is enough to make Richie’s cheeks burn and Eddie’s hand slips out of his so easily he thinks he’s going to cry.

Then Eddie rubs his hands together and turns to face Richie, pausing for a brief, introspective moment before he lifts them up to Richie’s cheeks.

“You’re so fucking cold,” Eddie says, like that explains what he’s doing. His voice is leaden with the cloying sweetness of wine and Richie realizes he wants to kiss him here and now in front of the hotel staff and the Midwestern couple that’s checking in from out of town at the front desk.

“Eddie,” is all he manages to say before time seems to skip and they’re in the elevator, standing side by side but not touching.

Ten stories up and their room is only a few doors down the hall. Richie has the key in his coat pocket and they both collapse in wordless heaps on their respective beds.

“Drank too much.” Eddie’s voice is muffled by his pillow, and Richie smiles into the darkness of the room.

“I noticed.”

“Can I tell you something?”

“If you want. No promises to not hold it against you in the morning. It being my dick.”

“Shut up.”

The room is silent for an arduously long time, with only the distant hum of the heater between them. Richie can hear himself swallow, the click of his throat like a gunshot in the night. He already misses home and the apartment that became theirs, the too small linen closet and the silverware that they share. Coffee mugs piled up in the sink and a song being sung from the bathroom, Eddie’s imperfect voice lulling Richie to sleep where he’s laying on the couch.

“I miss it,” Eddie says from the other side of the room and for a feverish second Richie thinks his mind has been read, before he realizes what Eddie means. “I miss who we were before all this. Summers and ice cream and the times when it was all of us and the times when it was just me and you. _ You. _ Rich, you. I miss you.”

Richie waits until he can hear Eddie’s breathing turn deep, until the urge to get close to him has subsided, until he’s sure he’s the only one awake in the world.

Then he says, “But I’m right here.”

—

Richie taps a finger on the head of the microphone in front of him and recoils from the screeching feedback.

He’s surprised by the intimacy of the room that’s in front of him. About sixty chairs crowded around tables, a bar in the back, and lights beaming down on him. If he had to guess, he’d say he’s going to spend the night drenched in sweat. Definitely should have worn a darker top.

It’s early afternoon and the place is practically empty, just employees milling about, stage hands and the bartender, an audio tech who sent him up here to test the mic setup.

“Hello, hello,” he says, remembering the intended purpose of his journey. He sees the audio tech, bald and eyebrowless, give him a thumbs up and returns the gesture.

He’s never felt nervous for a show before, though it’s been a while since he attempted to do one sober so that’s a factor on some level. He left all but a handful of his Adderall at home and he left coke back in 2007 where it belongs. He’s also still processing the fact that he woke up in the hotel room alone this morning with a message from Eddie on his phone that said he was going to drop by the apartment he shares with Myra.

Seeing _ Edward Kaspbrak _ in his notifications felt like a blast from the past, even though the point during which they were communicating primarily via Facebook can’t have been that long ago. He replied while still wrapped in blankets and probably went overboard, telling Eddie he hopes everything goes okay and to let him know if there’s anything he can do to help.

Eddie left him on read with that one.

Between the radio silence and the fact that his sober mind is mercilessly racing, he’s already sweating and pacing with hours to go before the doors open. Being up on stage isn’t helping his nerves any, either, so he makes his way down.

Out of the blinding lights he blinks and sees Bill Denbrough at the bar.

“Holy shit!” he yells across the room.

Bill chokes on whatever he’s drinking and it gets on the front of his flannel. “What do you mean ‘holy shit,’ like you didn’t _ ask _ me to come here?”

Richie ignores him and pulls him in for a hug, clapping Bill on the back harder than is strictly necessary and enjoying every second of it. He’s mad at Bill for having the audacity to grow up conventionally attractive, which feels like a slight against Richie in particular.

There was a time when someone had carved a list of hottest boys in their class on the inside of a bathroom stall and he and Bill had been tied for last. Eddie had explained to them all the way home why that wasn’t a bad thing until Richie had flown at him in a weird, prepubescent rage that felt like it came from nowhere. The two of them had ended up rolling down the side of the road as Richie yelled at Eddie that he was only saying that because he’d been ranked number seven.

It’s something he remembers with a strange intensity, all the way through to staying over at Bill’s for dinner, the two of them slinking upstairs under the guise of doing homework together when in reality they had a long discussion about the list that had resolved itself with the two of them agreeing they were both going to get hot someday.

Standing in front of Bill now, he certainly didn’t get tall, but he definitely got hot. Richie feels that the inverse is true for him, but has no intention to tell Bill about that particular reading of the situation.

No, instead he orders a whiskey and soda, grabs a stool, and listens to Bill talk about what it’s like to date a B-movie actress. It’s a topic he never thought they’d have to touch on, but here they are, with Bill admitting he helps her run lines over Skype sometimes and asks her what he should have the heroine in his next novel do.

“That’s kind of like—well not the _ same _ thing, but ever since he moved in I keep bugging Eddie with joke ideas,” Richie says, internally mortified that he couldn’t go ten minutes in a conversation without mentioning Eddie.

“Yeah?” Bill seems to have noticed, which is one of Richie’s least favorite things about him. It’s never been particularly fun to be close to someone with the uncanny ability to pick up on the details he’d prefer to gloss over. “Jesus, I would not want to live with you two. Do you still fight like cats and dogs?”

Richie shrugs. “I wouldn’t really call it fighting. We bicker. It’s endearing. I think if we ever actually _ do _ fight, it will be apocalyptic. Someone will die.”

“Well, in that case I’m sure Eddie will let us know how you went out,” Bill replies, taking a sip of his beer and looking pleased with himself.

“Oh, funny guy, huh?”

“No that’s _ you__,_ literally.”

“Mmhm, apparently.” Richie rubs at his cheek, uncomfortable at the reminder and then reaching into his jacket pocket. “Actually, do you want a sneak peak? ‘Cause I have my notes.”

After months of staring at an empty Google doc, he finally pulled out one of the journals he always meant to write in and started doing just that. He stopped trying to be funny and just wrote, stream of consciousness, what was going on. Jumping from moments in the past to the present and in-between, intertwining the two. His handwriting is rushed and sloppy and he resists the urge to apologize for it as he hands the journal over with a page marked.

At this point he’s made his peace with the fact that his set for this tour is more intimate than he planned—_much _ more intimate. It’s personal on a level he’s never allowed one of his shows to be, in a way his shows never could be when he wasn’t the one writing them. It does feel a little like he’s cracked open his chest and written the thing in blood, but Bill’s seen him bleeding before. Bill’s patched up his _wounds_ before. The least he can do is let him see the final product before anyone else.

He stirs his drink and watches Bill read over the page in front of him with a nervous thrumming sound in his ears.

When Bill looks up, he has a weird smile on his face and he says, “You’re gonna read all this tonight?”

“I mean, not word for word, but.” Richie brings his glass to his lips. “Yeah, it might get a little gay if that’s what you’re asking, Bill.”

Bill sputters out a shocked laugh, but his grin just spreads wider over his face. “That’s great. No, it’s different. And not just because of that. It doesn’t feel like...I don’t know, like this endless list of joke, joke, joke.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Richie says, sheepish but pleased. He feels like he’ll never quite grow out of wanting Bill’s approval, the closest thing to a big brother he’s ever had even though they’re the same age.

“You’re braver than me, man.” Bill pats the pages in front of him with his hand. “I like to leave the past in the past.”

Richie licks at his lips and realizes what’s been hanging between them this whole time. “How, um. How is he? Your brother?”

“Oh!” Bill surprises him by lighting up like a Christmas tree and pulling out his phone, flipping through his camera roll with ease. “He’s—well, just look at what he made.”

Richie takes his phone and strains to hear the sound. It’s Georgie alright, red-haired and grinning in what Richie guesses is a technology lab. Richie feels guilty for looking at his left arm before anything else, the prosthetic there clunky only because he remembers holding Bill in the aftermath, remembers Georgie in the hospital, remembers not understanding how any one person could lose that much blood.

He snaps himself out of that particular train of thought and tries to focus on the video, which ends up being surprisingly easy because apparently Georgie is building a fucking robot arm.

“A fucking robot arm,” Richie says, under his breath.

“Exactly. I knew you’d get it,” Bill replies, with a smile so proud Richie’s heart hurts. “It’s his final project for undergrad, and he’s applying to grad school with the design. I understand roughly two percent of how it works, but it really doesn’t matter.”

“Because it’s a fucking robot arm,” Richie repeats. “That’s all you have to understand. Can I be friends with _ him _ on Facebook? Being friends with you is boring now.”

“Shut up,” Bill says, snatching his phone out of Richie’s hand and playing keep away with it. “You’re so stupid. I don’t even like you. Go make out with Eddie.”

“Maybe I will!”

It’s all downhill from there, the two of them spiraling into a back and forth argument that has both of them laughing and ordering more drinks from the bar until the bartender cuts them off, reminding Richie he has a show to do.

“Hey, um, thanks,” he says to Bill as they vacate their stools. He has to head backstage and Bill has to head to his seat like a normal audience member.

“For what?” Bill asks, looking genuinely perplexed.

“I’m not nervous anymore,” Richie says.

He carries that with him backstage.

—

Richie leaves the stage feeling like he’s flying ten thousand miles high, on top of the world.

He had one guy walk out halfway through his opening and thought he was going to tank after that, had a wavering second of self-doubt so powerful he almost sank to his knees in front of the crowd. But instead he made some off the cuff joke about not being everyone’s cup of tea ("maybe I'm not even a cup of tea, maybe I'm like...a really cheap, gay cup of coffee") and managed to sweat his way through it until the end.

Now he’s riding the applause-induced serotonin rush into the prep room backstage, a cramped space that barely fits a loveseat and a rickety coffee table, picking up his phone and feeling his stomach drop.

He has seven missed calls and a string of missed messages, almost all of them from Eddie, and he can feel his heart racing as he swipes right to call Eddie back.

The phone rings and rings and rings, and then, “Hello, you’ve reached Eddie Kaspbrak, if your call is urgent you can—”

Richie hangs up and scrolls through the messages. He’s got Bill apologizing for having to head out without saying goodbye and Ben and Beverly bombing him with selfies from their meet up in Chicago, and then he has Eddie.

_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ Uh yeah so it didn’t really go well dude  
_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ I told her I needed some air so I’m outside and i’m like...not doing well?  
_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ Fuck I know you’re doing you’re show I know that’s why you’re not picking up but i really need you to pick up  
_ Edward Kaspbrak: _ okay i’m going back in so just...message me back i’ll call you when i can  
_ Edward Kaspbrak: _this is so fucked up

“Fuck, fuck, _ fuck _ _,_” Richie hisses under his breath, biting at the sleeve of his shirt. He can feel the familiar creep of a panic attack at the back of his throat, the tightness there, something he can’t escape. Then his phone starts ringing.

Stan’s name flashes across the screen and he picks up without thinking.

“Richie?” Stan’s voice is pitched up, somewhere in a higher register than usual.

“It’s me,” Richie says, allowing himself to relax the muscles in his shoulders, to let go of the tension there. Something about talking to someone else who knows Eddie—who knows where he comes from, who knows at least a fraction of what is going on—is grounding.

“I talked to Eddie.” Stan speaks in a perfunctory way that is oddly calming. “He messaged me when he couldn’t get a hold of you.”

“I just got done with a show.” Richie’s pulling on his jacket and then staring in the mirror. He’s wondering strange things like if he needs a haircut, grasping for normalcy like it’s the edge of a life raft.

“Did you know he was going to try and break up with her?” Stan asks, words tinged with judgment that hits Richie right in the gut.

“Yes,” he admits. His eyes are fixated on one point of the mirror, the reflection of the light switch behind him. He can’t tear his gaze away from that spot, can’t even move. “I thought it was a good thing. A good idea."

“I don’t disagree.” Richie can see Stan in his mind’s eye, though he looks fourteen and like a string bean, pacing up and down the length of his bedroom and holding one hand like a knife over the chopping board going _ whack, whack, whack _ every time he makes a point as Richie sits cross legged on the bed and watches him. “Their relationship is clearly a minefield that Eddie navigates his way through, unaware that Myra’s the one who laid out all the traps. I’ve tried to subtly suggest it’s not healthy to him for a while now. I think getting some distance from it helped him realize that was the case...”

“But?” Richie tears his eyes away from the light switch and turns on his heel to head out into the hallway. He finds the backstage area mostly clear of people and he’s able to duck out the back way with just a simple wave to the omnipresent audio tech.

“_But _ I have a feeling you underestimated the hold she has on him.” Here, Stan would wheel around and face Richie head on with a stare that would have made a professional wrestler feel small. “It’s like with his mom. You remember how that shit was. It’s cyclical and you let him go there alone.”

“Okay, okay I fucking get it!” Richie is an alleyway not unlike the ones he remembers biking through in Derry, trapped between a dumpster and staring at the graffiti on the wall, a scene he doesn’t understand because he didn’t grow up here. “I’m going to get him—but Stan?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

Stan is silent on the other end and Richie looks up at the sky. Dark and dim and endless, but there’s a light out there somewhere.

“No,” Stan says, after a long moment. “No, I’m not. And you’re the only one I can say that to right now.”

“I can make time for you.” Richie feels pulled apart at the seams, not sure if he's telling the truth.

Stan laughs on the other end of the line and the sound startles Richie because it was the last thing he was expecting. “I’ll take a rain check on Richie Tozier’s School for Repressed Emotions, how about that?”

“I think I’d come up with a better name than that,” Richie says, but he’s smiling and he hopes Stan can hear it.

“I know you would,” Stan agrees. “Go, go help Eddie. He’s waiting for you.”

Richie ends the call and orders an Uber, sending one last message while he waits.

_ Beep “Beep” Richard: _ Richie Tozier’s School for Wayward Losers?  
_ Stan Uris: _We’ll...work on it.

—

Two flights of stairs bring Richie to a nondescript apartment door. He knocks and then stands in the hallway blinking sleep out of his eyes until someone pulls the door open. Then he puts on his widest smile.

“You must be Myra,” he says to the blonde woman eyeing him from doorway.

“Yes,” she replies shortly. Richie feels like maybe he’s been both unkind and too nice to her in the past. She’s pretty in a soft way, but he instantly feels that her softness belies something under the surface, like the calm lull of ocean water just above the deadly undertow.

From behind her he hears Eddie calling, “Can you let him in, Myra? I told you he was coming. I need his help taking things back to the hotel.”

Taking things. That’s news to Richie. He doesn’t let his smile falter though, keeps it on as Myra allows him to pass through the door and enter into what can barely be called a hallway. It’s two feet of tile that leads directly into a cramped, but nicely updated kitchen with recessed lighting and brushed silver cabinet fixtures, all the things that Richie associates with some level of success living in a city like this.

Eddie is hovering over a box on the counter that he's throwing things into. “I told you he was coming,” he repeats, eyes sliding over Richie like he won’t let himself acknowledge him. “I can’t carry this stuff outside by myself.”

“I don’t understand why you’re taking anything at _ all_,” Myra says, seeming to follow Eddie’s lead by promptly ignoring that Richie is there. “You’re forgetting all the good things here because you’ve been far away, that’s all. You just need to come back—"

“No, I don’t,” Eddie says firmly.

Richie is still standing in the front hallway in his jacket, looking and back and forth between the two of them with wide eyes like he’s at a ping pong match. He’s heard of fights like these but never witnessed one up close and personal.

“Should I, uh,” he says, resisting the urge to flinch when they both swivel to look at him, “help with any of this? Do you need...help, Eds?”

He feels sharp relief when Eddie looks him in the eyes and seems to answer without words, _ yes please help me. _Out loud he says, “No, I’m gonna go grab some stuff from the bedroom. Just wait for me.”

Richie follows him halfway, stopping in the adjacent living room while Eddie heads down a hallway that seems to lead to the bedroom. Taking a step back, Richie surveys the space he’s in now. It looks like someone's idea of a happy life. The walls are painted lavender and there are flowers everywhere.

“Did someone die?” he asks, before he can stop himself.

Myra looks deeply offended, her mouth set into a frown. “I arrange flowers as a hobby. Eddie never told you?”

“Can’t say that he did.” In fact, Richie realizes, he knows nothing about Myra aside from the fleeting idea of her he’s gotten by looking at her Facebook a handful of times and listening to Eddie talk to her on the phone a few times a week.

All he knows is that she’s a paralegal, she’s tired of being a bridesmaid, and she makes Eddie deeply unhappy on a regular basis. It’s enough for him—he doesn’t need to know anything else.

“Well, I know all about you,” she says in a tone of voice that Richie doesn’t know what to make of. It’s almost as if she thinks he’s a joke, which isn’t an entirely new thing for him. Just surprising coming from someone he’s only known for ten minutes.

“Oh?” Richie feels himself start wringing his hands. It’s not a conscious decision but this woman is scrutinizing on a level he didn’t think was possible. He feels like a piece of gum on the bottom of her reasonably priced flats.

“Sure, Eddie would flip through the channels and put on some comedy special you did and he wouldn’t even laugh! Sometimes you’d even put him to sleep.” She has a smug smile on her face and it makes Richie’s heart feels heavy in his chest with the realization.

He sees it in his mind’s eye. Eddie in this apartment without him, stuck with a woman who will never understand. The sound of Richie’s own voice echoing down the empty hallway, none of his jokes landing. But Eddie didn’t change the channel, he kept Richie on, and that means something. Maybe it was the cadence of Richie’s voice or the way he said certain words, maybe it was the hand gestures and the unbridled, powering through to the end energy, or maybe it was just the way he smiled at the camera.

Richie isn’t sure but he can see now that Myra doesn’t get it on a level so deep it makes him want to shake with anger.

Instead he just smiles thinly at her and says, “Well, I never claimed to be funny.”

She huffs at that and leaves the room, following Eddie down the hall and Richie wanders around trying to find something that tells him Eddie lives here. But it’s all dried flower petals and self-help books and plaques with kitschy statements on them.

His eyes get stuck on one that says _ You don’t have to be crazy to live here - but it helps! _

“I’ll fucking bet,” he mutters under his breath.

The couch is brown suede and the television is dusty. The cherry wood bookcase is only half-full of books, the rest of the shelving space taken up by framed pictures and porcelain figurines of doe-eyed angel children that Richie doesn’t want to look too closely at.

He does take the time to examine some of the pictures, though, getting stuck on one in particular of Eddie and Myra smiling in front of the pristine expanse of a lake that he imagines is located upstate. Eddie’s arm is around Myra’s shoulder and his smile is all teeth, which isn’t right. When Eddie’s really happy he doesn’t have some cheesy look on his face. He scrunches up his nose, his mouth twists up, and his happiness is all in his eyes.

Richie can’t help but think he and Eddie would take a better picture together. He’d kiss Eddie on the cheek and Eddie would get fake-mad and you’d be able to tell in the picture that the two of them—the two of them—

Richie thinks of their apartment together, its bare walls and the decorating they could do when they get back. They could go through a home goods store, each of them piling stuff into a cart. The place could be an apocalyptic mix of classic and adventurous. Pictures on the walls, a little table at the front door for their keys, and maybe Richie could get his office back. Maybe they only need one bedroom.

His line of thought is broken when he hears a low, keening sound coming from down the hall, Eddie’s voice over top of it.

The sound sets something off in Richie’s stomach, an anxiety he didn’t realize he was still capable of. Without thinking he follows it and ends up standing in another doorway that frames the scene of Eddie and Myra’s life in stark contrast to what he’d imagined it to be.

Myra’s face is dry and her hands are up in her hair, but she’s making sounds like she’s crying while Eddie says, “Please can you not do this, please not right now. Sometimes I have to do things for...for myself.”

“But what about _ me__?_” Myra wails, banshee-like. Her cheeks are bright red and Richie has seen people cry before, he’s seen people broken by what someone else is doing to them. Myra isn’t crying, not really, and her hurt is so plainly selfish he can’t stand it.

Richie feels that distinct discomfort in his stomach again and he’s considering turning and walking away when Eddie catches his eyes. Again, it’s non-verbal, but Eddie might as well be screaming it.

_Do something._

“Um, yeah we have to go,” Richie blurts out.

Myra’s eyes shoot open and she stares at him like she forgot he was in the apartment. Like he’s an intruder.

“I, uh, I have to be up in the morning for another show and Eddie’s supposed to help me with lines.”

“What is he still doing here?” Myra hisses in Eddie’s direction.

“He—what? He’s my friend, he’s helping me,” Eddie says, and Richie feels like he’s going to be sick.

He’s known Eddie for practically his entire life, seen him every which way. Indignant, passionate, worried, fearful, all the way down the line to such specifics as ‘unable to stop laughing at something that isn’t funny at one in the morning.’ He’s only seen Eddie like _ this _ a handful of times before, and every single one of them involved his mom.

It’s all in the way Eddie’s got his shoulders up to his ears, the way he has his head down, the way he’s shrunk himself to fit into what little space he’s been allotted in this apartment that’s supposed to be half his.

Myra is saying something that Richie can barely wrap his head around, he’s so struck by the image of Eddie cowering across from her. Something about how this is her home and how could Eddie invite a stranger into her home.

“I’m not a stranger,” Richie interjects, cutting her off and moving forward. “I’ve known him longer than you have. C’mon, we’re leaving.”

“Richie.” Eddie’s knuckles are white where his hands are wrapped around the edges of the box in front of him. “Maybe I should just stay. That might be best, actually.”

“No, it wouldn’t be best, _ actually_.” Richie can feel his own anxiety spiking again, mostly from the way Myra is watching them, staring Eddie down like a territorial dog. But anxiety is a weird thing in him, just as likely to make him act wild as it is to make him shy away. “You came here to do something and I’m not going to let you leave without doing it.”

“What are you talking about? What is he talking about, Eddie?” On the other side of the room Myra has reached a fever-pitch.

Eddie is frozen in place. He doesn’t answer.

“He’s moving across the country from you and taking all of his shit,” Richie says, unable to stop himself. “What do you_ think _ he’s doing?”

That question seems to stop Myra in her tracks, her brow furrowed and her lip quivering.

Richie looks into the box in front of Eddie. Books and a fancy alarm clock, a photo album, a yearbook, and some prescription pill bottles.

“Do you need anything else?” he asks quietly, hand on Eddie’s shoulder. He’s set at ease when Eddie shakes his head and starts to move.

It’s not until they’ve made it to the living room that Myra comes up behind them.

“Eddie,” she says, so pitifully Richie almost feels sorry for her. “Eddie, you can’t leave me. What about—what about the summer family trip and, and buying the house outside of the city together? What about the wedding, Eddie—”

Eddie turns so suddenly he nearly bowls Richie over. He stands in the middle of a room full of half-dead flowers and pictures where he’s wearing a fake smile. “Myra,” he says forcefully, “I’m not going to marry you. I don’t want to marry you. And I felt bad about that for a long time. I felt like something was wrong with me. But I’m done being sorry and this?”

He gestures all around, between the two of them and to the suede couch, the dusty television, the bookcase and the flower vases.

“This is over.”

Their escape from the apartment isn’t seamless. Myra continues to pretend to cry and Richie is balancing two boxes in his arms while Eddie shakily leads him to the stairwell, breathing so heavily Richie is scared he’s going to collapse.

He nearly does at the top of the stairs, letting out a terrifying, strangled sound before dropping his head into his hands.

“Did I do the right thing?” he asks Richie, his voice run ragged.

Richie sets the boxes down, well aware this is a public space but unable to find it within himself to care. “C’mere,” he says, opening his arms and sighing when Eddie falls into them. “I think you did what you had to for yourself.”

“But there is a part of me that thinks that’s wrong. That thinks I shouldn’t hurt another person even if I’m doing what’s best for me.”

“That’s the part of you that needs therapy, dude,” Richie says, mostly just to feel Eddie wheeze a little laugh against his neck. “And anyway, she clearly didn’t think that way about you. All I saw in there was her hurting you over and over again.”

Eddie sucks in a breath and holds it for a long moment, then exhales. “Wanna know something fucked up?”

“Always.”

“That wasn’t even that bad.”

Richie carries a well of emotions within him and his anger is buried deep, all the way at the bottom. He pulls it up to the top now and allows it to settle. He passes by the idea of anger at Myra and settles on the idea of being angry for Eddie, instead. There’s a difference there, something he wouldn’t have understood in the past.

But he understands it now, in this poorly lit stairwell with Eddie in his arms. There’s nothing he can do but understand. 

—

When they get back to the hotel, there’s no conversation.

Richie’s bed is covered in discarded clothes and phone chargers, deodorant and underwear. Eddie’s is pristine even though they put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door when they checked in. There’s a mutual shuffle of changing clothes. Richie sits on the end of Eddie's bed, watching as he does the bare minimum of his nightly routine, putting lotion on his face after he brushes his teeth.

With spots of lotion still not fully seeped into his skin, Eddie brushes past Richie and says, “Lay down with me.”

It’s a classic sort of Eddie demand, his voice petulant and tired and impossible to deny. Impossible for _ Richie _ to deny, at least, partly because it’s the exact thing he’s wanted since he first stepped into Eddie’s hotel room back in LA, back when they were still feeling each other out and needed the television on as a third person in the room between them.

He lays down with Eddie.

They’ve been in the same bed in the past few months, but always just barely touching. Side by side, on their backs, looking at cracks in the ceiling. Richie takes that pose, expecting that to be the end of it and okay with that, but Eddie is the one who comes close, pulling himself close to Richie’s side and laying his head on Richie’s shoulder, an arm across Richie’s chest.

“I know you hate this,” Eddie says.

“What?” Richie feels dizzy.

“Touching, like this, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“Oh. Yeah, no. If it’s you—it’s fine.”

For a second Eddie seems to hold his breath and then Richie feels an exhale of air against his shoulder. “Jesus. Sometimes you say things and I, I don’t know what to think.”

“Sorry,” Richie says, automatically. Normally he wouldn’t apologize, but it’s late and he’s tired and he doesn’t know how he’s going to sleep after what happened back at the apartment. “Are you going to be, uh...okay?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think about it. I don’t _ want _ to think about it.” Eddie’s tone is surprisingly even. “How did your show go?”

The sudden change in topic is both welcome and unwelcome. Richie feels like they have to talk about what happened, but also that it might be too soon, too dangerous. Although his shows fall under the same banner in his opinion. A county-mile wide silk banner that says, _ Hey Let’s Fucking Not, Not Right Now, Not When You’re This Close, Not After the Night You’ve Had. _

“Good, actually,” he says vaguely. “Bill came. I haven’t even had time to tell you, but he showed up.”

“I wish I could have seen him.” Eddie shifts under the blankets and mumbles something under his breath before knocking a knee against Richie’s thigh. “I wish I could have just gone to the show and hung out with you guys. That would’ve been fun.”

Richie can’t think of anything better or worse than the idea of Eddie in the audience. He probably would have thrown up backstage and gone into autopilot mode with the microphone in front of him, parroting old jokes about tits and ass. It would have been a disaster, but Eddie would have been there, so.

“I’ve always wondered—do you know your routine by heart?” Eddie asks. He’s talking into Richie’s shoulder, against the skin there, and his breath is hot. It’s distracting and soothing, the fact that Eddie is warm against him, burning up, a portable little furnace.

“I mean, yeah, I don’t have a teleprompter,” Richie says, not quite seeing where this is going until the exact second that he does.

“Okay. Then do it.” It’s another Eddie demand, white-hot and knife-like in its ability to cut to Richie’s core.

This is a bad idea, a terrible idea, worse even than Eddie sitting in the audience with Bill at the show because at least then there would have been some distance between them and Richie could have hidden his vomit. Here, he just opens up his mouth and starts to speak.

“Um, well. I was fourteen, the first time I was in love. I saw him one day and I thought alright that’s it for me, he’s the one. You know how you are at fourteen, stupid and ugly and also sure that you’re going to find the love of your life any day now. That someone is going to look at you, a ninth grader in a Hawaiian-print shirt and think, now there’s a keeper.”

“I liked your Hawaiian shirts. They were tropical,” Eddie mumbles into Richie’s shoulder.

Richie shushes him, but he’s smiling. “So, where was I? I-I’m fourteen and in love and—alright.” There’s no going back now. “He’s my best friend. I think everyone is in love with their best friend a little, but I was in love with mine a lot.”

Eddie is still against him, only breathing, and Richie can think of nothing else to do but continue right on through.

“There’s all the small stuff, you know? The way he knows how to push all my buttons, the way he walks around school in his shorts and tube socks, the way he looks at me when we’re in a big group of friends. I’m fourteen so I tell myself that maybe I’m overthinking it, but he always looks at me first. Every time, and...I’m cutting out all the funny parts, Eds. This isn’t even good, I’m—”

“No.” Eddie makes a fist against Richie’s chest and his voice is breathless. “No, keep going.”

“Okay, okay. So there’s all the small stuff, but there’s the big stuff, too,” Richie says, and he doesn’t know why but he feels like he’s going to cry. “I live in a small town in Maine and did you know that, um, as a state we supply ninety percent of the country’s lobster?”

Eddie giggles against his shoulder and the sound is watery.

“Well, we do. So it’s not a bad state, as states go. But I also feel trapped here, both inside and outside of myself. And the only place I feel like I’m really _ me _ is in my best friend’s bedroom, the two of us together every night that we can be. He lets me get away with so much, pinching his cheeks and calling him names. But it’s all just so he’ll laugh and I can hear that sound again. And I, I try to. I try to…”

“Richie, you don’t have to keep going.”

“But I do.”

Eddie leans down and presses his lips against Richie’s shoulder and Richie feels unable to speak for a moment. He closes his eyes and sees bursts of white against the backs of his eyelids, the way the universe will end. Then he opens them again.

“I try to remember when exactly I fell in love with him, but it wasn’t something that happened all at once. It was like the rising water of the river we played by as kids. Steady and over time, through rain showers and thunderstorms, until one day the banks were overflowing and you couldn’t walk by without getting wet. So it was more like that, more like one day I looked at him and thought oh okay, it’s _ you_, and after that I never looked away again.”

They settle into silence, which is a thing Richie normally can’t handle. He’ll say terrible, awful things to cut through quiet on a normal day. But tonight he falls into it like a bed of feathers. It’s in the way Eddie doesn’t move from his side, doesn’t tense up or turn cold.

He’s still so warm and he has a hand splayed over Richie’s chest and that says more than words could.

When Eddie does speak, his voice cracks. “Let’s go home,” he says, sounding prepubescent on the last o sound.

“To LA?” Richie asks, even though he knows in the pit of his stomach that isn’t what Eddie means.

“To Derry.”

“It’s a seven hour drive,” Richie points out, even though he knows he’ll do it. He’s not sure why he’s arguing. He has a whole block of free days between this weekend and the next and seven hours is nothing between the two of them.

“It is.” Eddie shifts next to him, his thigh pressing against Richie’s. “But did you mean me, just now? Were you talking about me?”

“Eddie,” Richie says, dismayed that there’s even a question. “Do I even have to—of course I fucking was. You’re the only—”

“Then let’s go back. We can see Mike. And some day it can be everyone. But this time it will just be us. I want to see it all, knowing what I do now. What you just told me. I need to go back and I need...I need...” Eddie breathes out shakily. “I _ need _ someone to acknowledge that I know what’s best for myself tonight.”

Richie swallows his fear and holds Eddie close.

“Okay. We’ll go. Me and you, just like always."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> richie and eddie on their way to derry: i hope this doesn't awaken any deep seated childhood trauma in me


	5. iv.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for this chapter: this whole thing is about comphet/internalized homophobia and the pain that causes in childhood, it also touches on the bullying both richie and eddie dealt with as kids and the addiction issues they deal with as adults

_ There is an ache. A thought in the back of your mind. A loss. _

_ The knowledge that you’re leaving before the school year starts, travelling halfway across the country in a U-Haul truck and not coming back. _

_ Your time is spent looking for birds, binoculars in hand, while your second closest friend reads about mating calls in the book he got from the library. He won’t smoke weed with you and you don’t know where to buy weed, so all around it’s not feeling like the best summer on record. _

_ You spot a nest one weekday in July and at the foot of the tree you find a bird with a broken wing. Your second closest friend goes to get help and it’s only when he’s gone that you realize you have no idea what to do. _

_ It’s a small thing, mostly white and grey with black coloring on its head like a hat. You do the only thing you can. You hold it in your arms and hope for the best. _

—

Eddie rents a ridiculously sized, black SUV with tinted windows that looks like a government vehicle.

When they go to pick it up, Richie finds he can easily imagine a full length movie trailer where they drive this thing. In his mind's eye, they roll up in suits and ties on someone’s front lawn, pull out badges, and bust down some nefarious, otherworldly organization.

“Are you sure this is a good car to drive to Maine in?” he asks, walking around the side and peering through one of the dark windows. He can only just see the shape of Eddie on the other side.

“Uh yeah, asshole.” Eddie sounds like he’s right next to him even though there’s a thousand tons of steel and plastic between them. He has, and always has had, the kind of voice that carries. “I’m not driving a sedan five hundred miles. The sight lines in anything that close to the ground are atrocious. This thing has four wheel drive, Bluetooth GPS, and more cup holders than seats. It’s perfect.”

“Okay,” Richie acquiesces, drawing invisible devil horns on the window, right on top of Eddie’s head, “but I’m picking the music.”

Several hours later Eddie attempts to throw Richie’s iPod into oncoming traffic because he won’t stop playing songs off the same _ Kid Hitz for 2Day _ playlist and they agree to stop at a sprawling grocery store set amid the endless fields at the edge of Connecticut.

It’s the sort of place that’s only open because there isn’t another place like it for twenty miles, its huge parking lot almost entirely empty, with a behemoth sign out front that can be seen from the nearby highway.

As they enter, the fluorescent lights above them are buzzing like an angry hornet’s nest and they’re greeted by a staff member who seems surprised to see anyone coming through the doors. Richie grabs a cart while Eddie leads the way, car keys in hand.

“We need candy, we need chips, we need soda,” Eddie lists off.

“Gamer fuel,” Richie offers as they make their way past the produce section without a second glance.

“Yeah—_no _. I refuse to spend time with someone who refers to himself as a gamer.” Eddie spins the keys around and points at Richie with one of them. “Actually, yeah, that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. I’ll abandon you in the parking lot if you do that again.”

“How’s that for some fuckin’ deja vu,” Richie says, not even joking. “My mom said the same thing to me when we were moving to Indiana.”

Eddie shoots him a look before turning down the aisle labelled _ Candy & Salty Snacks_. “She did not. Or, okay. I knew your mother at one point in my life. Maybe she said that, but she didn’t leave you.”

“You don’t know that!” Richie watches as Eddie crouches down and peruses which brands are on sale. He wonders if Eddie has coupons and thinks he probably would if this was any other day. They’ve only gone grocery shopping together on a handful of occasions, but he’s seen at least one cashier sigh at Eddie’s approach. Richie can sympathize. Eddie is definitely the type of customer you have to mentally prepare to deal with. “For all you know I had to grow up in the Indiana wilds by myself, hunting deer for food and bartering with rogue groups of traders just to make it in this cruel world.”

“Total bullshit. You would never and could never kill a deer.”

Richie makes an unintentional noise of indignation, even though he knows Eddie is right.

They travel up and down aisles that have nothing they’re looking for, cart already half full with things they can eat in the car. Eddie points out particularly good prices and gets intensely interested when they reach the gluten-free section. Richie finds a box of Pop-Tarts that offers free upgrades in _ Call of Duty _ and grabs them just to be annoying.

“You don’t play that game,” Eddie realizes as they check out, watching the Pop-Tarts get put into the plastic bag.

“Forget about that, what’s really stupid is that I don’t even like Pop-Tarts.”

Loading the bags into the car makes Richie appreciate the spacious back seat and the amount of cup holders available. They start the drive again with an open bag of individually wrapped Laffy Taffy between them and an Eddie-approved 80s playlist blasting.

Somewhere between Madonna and Boyz II Men, Eddie turns the volume down and goes, “We should probably talk about everything.”

“You think?” Richie asks before biting into a banana flavored Laffy Taffy.

“I do, and I also think this is the best way to do it. Both of us trapped in a car going seventy-five miles an hour, unable to leave.”

“To be fair, _ you _ can leave. You can stop the car at any time and get out, I’m the one who’s trapped.”

Eddie taps his ring finger against the wheel and grins. “Why do you think I wanted to drive?”

Richie showers him with Laffy Taffy wrappers.

Picking a strawberry one out of his hair, Eddie says, “I am trying to be serious here, you know. I’m trying to be a grown up. I can’t always be a fucking clown for you to bounce joke balloons off of.”

“Hold on.” Richie unlocks his phone and opens up his Notes app. “Joke balloons. I’m writing that down.”

“You get that you’re proving my point by doing that, right?” Eddie, for the tenth time that day, does a full driving test-level lane switch, checking his blind spots and everything. “You’re deflecting. I want to discuss serious shit and you’re—what are you even doing?”

“I live the life of a comedian. I'm always looking for new material and that was funny. You’re funny!” Richie’s halfway through his line of thought when the screen of his phone suddenly darkens and his ringtone goes off. “Oh, it’s Ben!”

“We’re having a conversation, don’t—”

Richie doesn’t listen. “Benjamin!”

“Hey, Rich, what the fuck?” Ben’s voice is so dramatically lower than it was when they were kids, it’s astounding. He, like Bill, got bit by the attractiveness bug on the uphill hike towards adulthood. “Are you guys really going to Maine?”

“Yuh-huh. Hey, Eds. Eddie.” Richie flips the phone around and presses it to Eddie’s cheek. “Say hi to Ben.”

Eddie lets out a long-suffering sigh. “Hello, Ben.”

“Aw, hi Eddie, it’s great to hear your dulcet tones.” Ben’s voice is tinny and amused.

“My annoyance is all with you-know-who, as usual,” Eddie says, the corner of his mouth twitching even as he tries to stay stoic. “Hey, actually—I’ll call you when I get a chance. I need your opinion on the color of something again.”

He and Ben share a little laugh at that, which makes no sense because it isn’t even funny. Richie puts the phone back to his ear, feeling weirdly put off.

“Now what was that you were saying?” he asks, leaning his head back and looking out the car window. Lines of budding trees fly past and the road, a dull, cracked grey, stretches on and on in front of them. A green sign catches his eye and boasts that the next exit features a Red Roof Inn.

“Just...you know, going back to Derry and all—I can’t imagine why anyone would want to.” Ben sounds genuinely worried in a way that jolts something in Richie back into place, like he’s a malfunctioning children’s toy with his wires all crossed. For a second there he was thinking of Ben like some kind of enemy, the two of them fighting for Eddie’s affection. Truth is, Ben is one of the only people in his life who has consistently seen through his bluster for what it is.

He’s also grown into an oddly serious adult. Brooding was not a word Richie used often before he reconnected with Ben. He seems to be the most sober of them all and the most steady. Maybe also the most lonely, which is saying something.

They’d all been lonely as kids, each of them crashing into each other over the years until they became something approaching a group. It had been a step up from how they'd previously been regarded: as the weird kids of their irrespective classes. But it hadn’t been until Ben and Beverly joined them that Richie was able to look around the circle and think _ everyone’s here. _

For the first time, he wonders if Ben knows that.

“I mean, Mike still lives there,” Richie manages to say, glancing towards the driver's seat. Eddie’s looking straight forward and biting at his thumb nail, pretending not to listen.

“Are you staying with him?” Ben asks.

“Nah.” Richie reaches up and pulls his glasses off, rubbing at one eye with the side of his hand. “He doesn’t have the space. We got a room at that place on State Street. The Townhouse.”

“Room—oh. Yeah, I remember biking past there a few times.” Ben is quiet for a beat, then says, “It’s just kind of out of nowhere. The two of you going back there. After everything that’s happened. Are you sure that’s the best idea?”

If Richie was alone in the car, he’d say no. He can feel the dread building in his stomach as they cross the Connecticut state line. They still have four hours to go and it's not enough. He thinks when they make it to Maine he might have Eddie pull over so he can puke on the sign welcoming them to the state.

He remembers reading that sign when returning from trips to visit family in Vermont, reading it every time.

_ Welcome to Maine — The Way Life Should Be! _

He’d once asked, “What the fuck does that mean anyway?” and been forced to literally wash his mouth out with soap when they got home. He’d never gotten an answer and it still doesn’t make any kind of sense to him.

Nothing about Maine or Derry in particular strikes him as idyllic or comforting. He’s not sure if that’s how everyone feels about their hometown, or if it’s just a cross the seven of them bear. In a lot of ways, this particular brand of aversion to the place they come from seems reserved just for them. So he knows where Ben is coming from, he just doesn’t have a good answer for him.

Instead he says, “I don’t know, but that’s where we’re headed. How’s Bev?”

“She left this morning, but she’s good, Richie. She’s...really good.”

Richie wonders after they end the call if that’s how he sounds when he talks about Eddie, like he’s trying to keep the lid on something obvious. Like he’s trying to pretend there’s not a part of himself that will always be fourteen and in love for the first time.

He and Eddie spend most of the rest of the drive in silence.

—

They check in at the front desk and end up standing in the doorway of their room staring at the one bed in front of them.

“Richie, it’s fine,” Eddie says after half a minute of silence, “don’t be weird about it.”

“Weird?” Richie puts a hand to his chest. “I’m just trying to protect my money maker. You elbowed me in the face last night.”

Eddie scoffs. “No one is paying you for your cheekbone structure, _ that _ I can guarantee you.”

While Eddie puts his clothes away in the provided dresser, Richie heads downstairs to see if the place is anything like he imagined when he was a kid. The original structure was built during the 1930s and renovated when he was in second grade, which had seemed like a big deal at the time.

Looking around, he doesn’t think it’s been renovated since. There’s a lot of mahogany and brass features, ornate wallpaper and embroidered pillows on meticulously upholstered couches that have seen better days. He snaps half a dozen pictures and sends them to the group chat, asking Bill if it looks like a good location for whatever his next film adaption ends up being.

_ Beep “Beep” Richard: _ this place is totally fucking haunted  
_ Beverly Marsh: _ 👻💀  
_ Bill Denbrough: _Somehow not the worst idea you’ve ever had???

The woman who checked them in had warned them she was about to leave for the night and theirs is the only car in the parking lot, so Richie is pretty sure the place is empty besides the two of them.

It makes him feel bold and he goes behind the bar in the lounge and picks out some strong-smelling brandy he’s probably not supposed to touch, carrying it upstairs along with a couple of pilfered glasses.

Eddie’s sitting on the bed in pajamas and under eye cream and his face lights up when he sees the brandy. “Yes, perfect,” he says, motioning for Richie to hand it over, which he does without hesitation.

He watches Eddie pour as he sinks down into the lone chair in the room, a pumpkin orange monstrosity set in the corner. “I figured you could use something to take the edge off, after seven hours in the car with me.”

“Hm, seven and a half. There was the rush hour traffic when we went through Augusta,” Eddie reminds him as he passes a quarter-full glass to Richie. “I appreciate the concern, but it wasn’t so bad if I forget the stretch where you forced me to play I Spy.”

“Oh, what’s with the revisionist history—you were the one who wanted to play!” Richie means it as a joke, but Eddie bristles at the comment unexpectedly, pulling his legs up underneath him and drinking the rest of what’s in his glass in one gulp.

“Whatever,” Eddie says, unscrewing the bottle again with a flourish of his wrist.

Richie watches him pour more of the brown liquid into his glass and suddenly feels stupid for bringing it up. It just seemed like the adult thing to do, drinking together in their hometown. He thought it might help them forget their surroundings, but it’s been clear to him for a while now that this isn’t something Eddie can do in moderation.

“Um.” He leans back, filled with nervous energy as he plucks at a loose thread in the arm of the chair. “Do you have anywhere you want to go tomorrow before we have dinner at Mike’s?”

Eddie makes a non-committal noise, somewhere between a sigh and a grunt. “It’s not like I have family here anymore.”

“Neither do I,” Richie says, instead of what he wants to say, which is closer to _ it was your idea to come here, how can you not know what to do, don’t tell me your plan is to get day drunk and stay in bed. _ “Maybe we could head over to the Barrens?”

“Sure. I don’t care.” Eddie drinks the brandy like it’s fruit juice. Richie hasn’t even touched his yet. “We can check and see if Twist and Dip is open yet.”

“The ice cream place?” Richie is struck by the reminder of it, the blue wood sides and the fluorescent open sign in the window, the row of benches out front and the gravel in the back where they’d lay their bikes down on any given sticky summer day.

“Mmhm.” Eddie’s leaned back now, resting his weight on one elbow. His cheeks are flushed. “I thought it would be a good place to visit. Me and you.”

It’s where they kissed the first, and only, time. Richie’s heart was in his throat, there was the buzz of cicadas in the air, the sun was high in the sky and beating down on the exposed skin of his neck. Sweat was dripping from his heavy head of hair and Eddie’s mouth was warm underneath his as he’d leaned up for more, just a little more, Richie.

He could’ve kissed a hundred, thousand people since then and it wouldn’t matter. When he thinks of that deep down, gut punch moment behind Twist and Dip, it beats them all.

“Yeah,” he says, dazed with the weight of the memory. “They probably won’t be open, but. Worth a shot.”

Eddie hums in agreement and then leans so far back he’s laying down. “Richie,” he mumbles.

“Yeah?” Richie sits still where he is, watching as Eddie’s chest rises and falls in slow motion.

After a couple minutes of waiting, Richie makes himself busy. He returns the brandy and glasses to the bar, hoping no one notices any of it is missing. He unpacks just enough of his suitcase to change his clothes and brush his teeth. He eases the blankets from under Eddie so he can crawl over him and cover the both of them up.

Outside, the wind rattles the windows and the joints of the townhouse. There will be frost in the morning, not exactly a rarity in early spring in Maine.

Inside, Richie tosses and turns until he allows himself to pull Eddie close.

Then he’s warm.

—

They head out the next morning wrapped in scarves and wearing gloves, Richie having popped some Adderall and Eddie with a coffee cup full of red wine from the downstairs bar, neither of them in a good mood.

In the end, they realize the high school isn’t far away and end up outside the gates staring at a building that’s comically smaller than they remember. The lights are out and the football field is silent. The sign on the front lawn says _ ENJOY SPRING BREAK - BRING BACK SUMMER WEATHER! _

“I guess technically it’s good timing,” Eddie points out, gesturing to the scene in front of him with his cup, “because otherwise a bunch of people would be seeing two grown men standing outside the local high school. Then someone would call the cops and I’d have to do a breathalyzer test. I don’t think I could handle the stress in my current, fragile state.”

Richie has already started climbing the fence surrounding the football field.

“Oh my God. This isn’t happening,” he hears Eddie say behind him.

“It is. Come on.” The top isn’t as far away as it seems, although he knows he has a height advantage. “We can walk the track, like in gym class.”

It was something they did in ninth grade together, Richie running backwards while Eddie ranted about the injustice of it all, how no one with fucking asthma should have to run a mile. The gym teacher—a gum cracking, stone-faced man with a whistle surgically attached to his lips—would yell things like, “Come on Tozier, I don’t see a medical excuse on your sheet! Let’s get a move on!”

Richie would run circles, literally, around Eddie all the way to the finish line and gleefully take whatever punishment was doled out. Once it was a game of dodgeball, twenty-three against one with Eddie sitting on the sidelines. Richie had lasted a surprising amount of time and only ended up with one bruised knee for his trouble. Hardly a price to pay when all was said and done.

Now, they’re free to walk the track at their leisure, providing Eddie gets over the fence. Which he’s able to do, though not without complaining, with some assistance from Richie.

“Gym class fucking sucked,” Eddie says when they’re halfway across the track. It feels weird, like they’re stuck in some parallel universe of the past that only includes the two of them.

“I didn’t mind it.” Richie shrugs, turning so he can walk backwards. “But I didn’t have,” he mimics the crash and boom of thunder and lightning, complete with hand motions, “_asthma_.”

That gets his first laugh of the morning, short and with an eye roll. “Yeah, therein lies the issue. These days kids have so many fucking rights, and I’m happy for them, but where were _ my _ rights? I almost passed out on at least three separate occasions out here.”

Richie can remember at least one of those, and he’s pretty sure it was something more akin to a panic attack brought on by a Bowers-related incident at lunch. If he peels back the layers of the memory enough he can recall Eddie being called a faggot for asking if what they were being given that day had gluten in it. Richie’s blood had turned cold the way it always did when that word was hurled in his general vicinity and he’d stood stock still and done absolutely nothing to help.

He’s pretty sure it was Bill, stutter and all, who’d threatened to make a scene and Bowers had backed off because it had only been three months since Georgie’s accident at that point, the blood and gore fresh in all of their minds.

“You remember Henry Bowers, right?” he asks as they round the corner towards the visitor’s side bleachers.

Eddie commits to a full body shiver at the mention. “I try not to. Fucking piece of work. There was at least a month straight where I was convinced if I went anywhere by myself he was going to jump me with his switchblade and cut off one of my ears.”

“Sometimes I wonder why he had it out for us in particular,” Richie says, well aware he’s playing stupid. Bowers was never a master of subtlety.

“Well, he thought he was at the top of the food chain and he hated everyone he thought was below him.” Eddie huffs out a breath that’s visible in the air and meets Richie’s eyes for a half a second before he glances away. “He hated Stan for being Jewish, Mike for being black, Ben for being fat, Bev for having the audacity to be poor _ and _ a girl, Bill for his stutter and us—us because—”

“I think he knew about me,” Richie says before Eddie can half-ass any kind of explanation. “There was this one time I was at the arcade in the movie theater.”

“_S__treet Fighter_,” Eddie murmurs over the lip of his cup. “Your favorite.”

“Yeah, um.” Richie is momentarily flustered by the warmth in Eddie’s voice. “I think I flirted with his cousin, so.”

Eddie does a literal spit take, laughing as he doubles over and they both stop walking. “With his _ cousin? _What the hell were you thinking, dude?”

“I didn’t know!” Richie protests, though a helpless bit of laughter trickles out of his own mouth, mostly in relief. “It wasn’t like I left the house that morning planning to bone down on Bowers’ cousin! He was just—I don’t know, cute!”

Eddie grimaces. “I can’t imagine anyone related to Henry being attractive.”

“Well, he was. He had this hair.” Richie shakes his head. “Whatever. It was literally a million years ago. They chased me out of the arcade to the park, calling me names and shit.”

“Rich.” Eddie’s face looks the way Richie imagines his own does when he thinks of that day in the cafeteria line. It’s all written there. Their inability to protect one another, the secrets they kept, the fact that it all could have been different. It’s a lot to swallow.

“It’s fine,” he says, and then he shakes his head. “Actually, fuck that. It’s not. It fucking sucks. There was no reason any of that should have happened. I try not to think about it too much, because when I do I feel like something was stolen from me. Maybe it’s stupid, but it’s like my childhood or my sense of self or—or...fuck. This is hard to talk about.”

“All the more reason to talk about it, dumbass.” Eddie elbows him and indicates that they should start walking again, so they do. “I’m not a therapist or whatever, but I can listen.”

“I have a therapist, actually.” Richie can feel himself getting dangerously close to spiraling into ten different trains of thought. “I just haven’t seen her since you moved in. Which I should fix. She helped ground me. Or made me feel like I wasn’t losing my grip, I guess. Where was I?”

“You were saying it’s hard to talk about,” Eddie reminds him with a surprising amount of gentleness.

Richie sucks in a breath of air. “Oh, yeah. It’s just. Something I spent every living moment at that age desperate to hide. All this time that I should have been able to spend having fun with you guys—and I did have fun with you guys, don’t get me wrong—but there was always a part of me thinking about what I was hiding from everyone. And then Bowers was like, oh yeah? I’m gonna look at you for ten seconds and see what you’re hiding inside you. I’m going to pull it out of you and I’m gonna say it out loud and it’s going to _ hurt _.”

“If it hadn’t been true, it would’ve been easier to shrug off,” Eddie agrees. His words come naturally, falling out of his mouth like they’ve been waiting in the wings for a while. Like he gets it.

Richie is silent for a second, then says, “Yeah, exactly. I don’t know, it made me feel like everyone saw it and I had to find some way to hide it.”

“Yelling about how much pussy you were drowning in at age thirteen was definitely the right move,” Eddie says, moving quickly to dodge Richie’s retaliating elbow. “Stop! It was annoying, but endearing. Every time you did it I was like, yeah, that’s Richie.”

“I’m glad my internalized homophobia was entertaining for you, at least.”

“Shut up! You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Richie pushes his hands into the pockets of his jacket and smiles down at the ground, “I know.”

They stop at the edge of the track closest to the fence they came over in the first place.

“How long until we head over to Mike’s?” Eddie asks, chewing on his bottom lip.

“He’s not off work for a couple hours.” Richie glances at phone and sees he has over fifty notifications from the group chat, which he scrolls through. “Oh, fuck! Patty proposed!”

“What! Lemme see!”

There’s a picture of Patty down on one knee and Stan with his face in his hands. Richie doesn’t know who the photographer was, but he envies them. He can feel the love a thousand miles away through his phone screen, so he can only imagine how it was in person. As it is, he feels overwhelmed by how closely Eddie is crowding him to see the pictures, their hands touching as he swipes through them all.

“That’s so..._ them_,” Eddie marvels, reaching out one hand to steady himself against Richie’s shoulder.

Richie leans into the touch and has to stop himself from wondering what everyone else will say when he sends them the pictures from this trip. What they’ll think about him and Eddie together, the stupid faces they make at the camera and the captions he chooses.

Whether or not other people will crowd around their phones, looking at it all. Ben and Beverly maybe, her with her hair pulled back and him saying, _ Oh, it’s Richie and Eddie! _ Beverly smiling warmly and saying, _ That’s so...them. _ Richie’s heart gives off a weak, fluttery beat at the idea of it all.

“Yeah,” he finally says, “it is.”

—

Downtown Derry is as dead as ever.

The only real crowds the town ever sees are during the summer, so the lack of people on an unseasonably cold spring day doesn’t come as a surprise.

The two of them are both in better spirits as the afternoon begins in earnest and they stop by a handful of mainstays, grabbing motion sickness tablets at Keene’s and perusing junk at Second Hand Rose. Richie flips through romance novels in the used books section of the thrift shop and reads passages out loud much to Eddie’s embarrassment, while Eddie rattles off ingredient lists in the pharmacy as they walk down the aisles.

Neither of them bothers suggesting they go to the park, where the Paul Bunyun statue looms over even the tallest trees, grinning its great plastic smile down at everyone who walks by.

By the time they’ve got a couple bags worth of useless stuff purchased, Mike is texting them that they can head to the library and they’re both starving, having forgotten to stop for lunch.

The library is old, stout and made of red bricks, half of which look like they’re liable to fall out of place at any second. Mike looks at home inside and gives both of them warm, crushing hugs, welcoming them with the biggest smile Richie has seen in ages.

He’s closing up the place as he tells them he _ lives _ there, which seems like an insane thing to reveal at the last second. At the same time, it’s so ridiculously _ Mike, _ it’s easy to forgive. Richie’s not sure he could explain it to anyone else, but between the three of them it’s clear and easy to understand. Mike Hanlon would absolutely live in the attic of a library and that’s all there is to it.

“We got you something,” Richie says, as Mike leads them up the staircase to the top floor.

“_We_?” Mike repeats, sounding amused at the idea.

“Yeah, we split the cost right down the middle.” Eddie’s voice echoes up the stairs.

“Wow, it must have taken you guys a while to save up.”

“You have _ no _ idea,” Richie says, right before he blurts out, “Wait, this is it?”

The top floor of the library is huge, wide open and full of even older books than are on the shelves downstairs. There are knick knacks spread throughout, with a bed pushed into one corner and a large table as the centerpiece. Looking at it, Richie feels sad that they didn’t know this part of the building existed as kids. He can only imagine the weird shit they would have done to make it up here.

“It’s humble,” Mike admits, “but it’s home for now.”

Eddie, who is having a mild coughing fit as he bats away at some cobwebs in the corner, says, “I think it suits you.”

“Yeah, you creepy motherfucker, it’s perfect for you.” Eddie brandishes the bag that contains Mike’s present. “And so are these guys.”

The present, twin gnomes that act as bookends, cause Mike to lose it and they end up the centerpiece of their dinner, on either end of the roast Mike somehow made up here in a crockpot. The logistics of the cooking situation escape Richie’s understanding, but he’s willing to accept it considering Mike is a better cook than anyone else in the room.

“No,” Mike says when Richie voices this opinion, looking between them. “Are you telling me—Eddie can’t cook?”

“Define ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ for me,” Richie says, twirling his fork around in the egg noodles on his plate.

“Oh, come on!” Eddie sounds exasperated but there’s a smile on his lips. “At least I _ try_. If it was up to Mr. Moneybags over here we’d eat out every single night.” He scrunches up his face and puts on a whiny voice. “Eds go pick up some egg rolls, Eds go grab me a pita wrap, Eds I want some sushi.”

Richie throws a noodle across the table. “You’re the one who burnt rice in the rice cooker!”

“It was _ one _ time!”

By the end of the night, Mike has them well fed and is leading Richie around the library while Eddie cat naps on the bed upstairs.

“I have the standard fare, crime novels and presidential biographies, all the stuff I have to keep stocked,” Mike is saying as they go between one carpeted aisle to the next. “And then I have the stuff I pay special attention to.”

“The pornography,” Richie says, solemnly.

“Pornography is visual media. What you’re thinking of is smut, and I do have some of that,” Mike replies, not missing a beat, “but no. I’m talking about the local history books, all the stories about the skinwalkers and disappearing settlements. The bigotry and shootouts. The stuff people want to forget.”

“Oh.” Richie feels slightly mollified, which isn’t an easy feat. Mike might be the only person on this floor of the building capable of such a thing. “Okay, yeah. A little more important than porn.”

“A little.” Mike stops in front of a display for ‘Bill Denbrough, Derry’s own mastermind of horror,’ smiling fondly. “You saw Bill a couple of days ago, yeah? How’d he seem?”

“Fine. He came to my show.” Richie shrugs and picks up one of the books, turning it over and scanning the back which sports half a dozen glowing reviews. “Why, you worried about him, Mikey?”

“He and Audra broke up,” Mike says.

Richie nearly drops the book. “Huh? Are you sure? He was talking about her like they were still—well, he didn’t tell me, that’s for sure.”

“Pretty sure, since he called me all mopey and sad about it.”

“Fuck.” Richie reflects on Bill the other night and can’t decide on if anything about him was out of place or wrong. It was their first time seeing each other in the flesh since the last day he set foot in this town, so his only comparison point was Bill as a teenager, with a long neck and a bad haircut. “Yeah I didn’t notice, man. I just got mad that he was hot.”

Mike chuckles at that, this honest to god deep and rumbling sound that sets Richie at ease. There were times when they were kids that Richie found himself on the outskirts of town with Mike, the two of them riding their bikes through the dirt while Mike’s dog ran after them, barking excitedly.

There had been a kind of peace among the fields that Mike’s family owned that Richie had struggled to find anywhere else, with anyone else.

“How’s Eddie, really?” Mike asks, gesturing towards the ceiling above them.

Richie shuffles the book from one hand to another. “Managing. Drinking a lot. Trying to pretend he doesn’t know how I feel.”

“He’s still drinking?” Mike looks concerned, his stupidly handsome face falling.

“Still?”

Mike gently takes the book from Richie’s hands and replaces it on the display. “It’s not really my place to talk about this, but yes. I think Eddie has been careful to show you only the parts of his life he thought would be palatable for you. Not in the sense that he was hiding things, but in the sense that he didn’t want to scare you off.”

Richie feels distress building in his chest which he very badly wants to bury deep. “Scare me off,” he repeats slowly. “Me? The one who—has he ever told you what happened when we were kids?”

“That’s vague, Rich, lots of things happened when we were kids,” Mike says, matter of fact. The worst part is, he isn’t wrong.

“I know.” Richie feels hysterical and doesn’t want to. “This is all hard to process. He didn’t tell me the full extent of things with Myra. I just thought she was his not so great girlfriend but, dude, she was manipulative as fuck. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Mike looks contemplative, set against the background of the spines of the books he cares for. Richie thinks, tracing his profile as he turns his head to the side, that there was a reason he always felt comfortable talking to Mike about things he couldn’t voice to the others, and maybe this was it. The way he’s always been so careful to protect the words people choose to tell their stories.

“What about you?” Mike asks, and the questions seems so out of left field Richie finds himself at a loss for words.

“What _ about _ me?”

Mike smiles at him so warmly it hurts. “Everyone else talks about what’s going on in their lives when we talk to each other, have you noticed that? Ben talks about his development plans and Bev sends design process shots. Stan sent the pictures of Patty proposing and Eddie kept us all in the loop regarding his promotion. You don’t do any of that.”

“No, I—” Richie stops himself. He was going to say does, that he told them all about the dates for his show and about the trip to Derry, but the truth is, Eddie did that. And before Eddie moved out with him, before he reconnected with them all, he didn’t tell anyone what he was doing day to day.

It was an endless slog of trying and failing to write material, talking on the phone with producers and agents and maybe, every once in a blue moon, his own sister. But that was it. He had girls he dated and never got close to, people who tried to befriend him on the comedy circuit and stopped reaching out after months of radio silence.

He’s not sure when he started mistaking making people laugh in a crowded room for real, genuine connection. Or how long he’s been convinced keeping everyone in his life at arm’s length would keep them from knowing the truth about him. 

“If I puke in your library, will you kill me?” he asks Mike, only half-joking.

“Richie, I thought you knew by now.” Mike’s smile looks sad. “I’m more than happy to be the one to hold back your hair.”

—

Mike is nice enough to give them a ride back to the Townhouse and Richie gets Eddie into bed before taking his time to pace downstairs, turning his phone over and over in his hands before giving in and calling Stan.

It’s late, so he’s not expecting Stan to answer, much less with a happy, “Richie!”

“Stan the man.” Richie grins into the phone as he taps the tops of the liquor bottles behind the bar. “I heard you’re spoken for.”

“_ Yes, _ ” Stan says, before launching into a grocery list of Patty’s best qualities, which include: a moderate level of spontaneity, an ability to make holiday-themed craft items for gifts, her soft hair, and the fact that she taught him how to parallel park in downtown Atlanta. “That’s not even the half of it, though. She’s _ perfect._”

“For you,” Richie offers, worried about where this conversation is going. “No one’s perfect, but it sounds like she’s perfect for you.”

“Mmh.” There’s the sound of a door closing behind Stan and then the constant humming sound of the outdoors, like Stan’s headed to a backyard space. “Maybe. Sometimes I feel like I'm not...you know. Enough for her.”

Richie grabs a tall bottle of vodka with no intention of drinking it. His hands are itchy and he’s thinking about Eddie.

“You’ve got a prospering accounting practice that has nowhere to go but up,” he says, not sure how anyone on that track of life could feel less than. “She proposed to you, dude. You’re respectful and charming and you have curly hair that looks good even when you sleep on it funny. How could she _ not _ be obsessed with you?”

Stan’s laugh sounds nervous. “Because, I don’t know. When holidays roll around we go to see her family and we don’t go to see mine. I don’t talk to my parents. My mom sometimes, but my dad won’t come to the phone when I call. He’s still mad about the dining table.”

“The dining table,” Richie repeats, from where he’s wandering the first floor of the Townhouse now. There’s an open-air kitchen with laminated signs reminding him not to use the stove or touch the coffee pot.

“Oh, yeah, you don’t know about that. Remember the dining table in my house growing up? The big one that I told you was carved out of a tree from Israel?”

“Okay, that rings a bell.”

“Right, well. It wasn’t made out of a tree from Israel, I lied.”

Richie sets the vodka down on the counter and snickers into his hand. “Were you trying to impress me, Stanley?”

“Maybe. Be quiet, this is serious! The dining set was actually one of the first things my grandparents bought when they came to America. So my dad was dead set on passing it down through the family, you know? But there was no way it was going to fit into the place we’ve been renting, and instead of understanding that, Dad took it as a personal sleight against the entire family.”

“I sense some underlying issues,” Richie says, opening the fridge and finding it empty except for a half-eaten bunch of grapes in a bowl. It’s a less impressive sight than he might have hoped for.

“Sure. Patty’s, you know, she’s not—how do I say this.”

“Jewish?”

“No, actually she’s like. Better at being Jewish than me. We go to this Reform place in the suburbs where everyone loves her. Which, I don’t know, maybe my dad doesn’t like? But it’s not that, no. She’s just—okay. Remember when I said she was perfect?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well, she’s not. She’s human. She’s made mistakes.”

“Shocking.” Richie pulls a chair out from the kitchen table and sits down, taking the opportunity to rest his eyes.

“I’ve tried to tell her so many times, it’s not _ her. _ But that sounds so dumb. Hey honey, my dad hating you isn’t anything personal, it’s just that he views you as the thing keeping me away from inheriting the most thankless job in the universe, being the Rabbi in fucking Derry, Maine!”

“Oh,” Richie is blown back, more than anything, by the fact that Stan just swore. “So what you're saying is, it’s not about the dining table.”

“Yeah,” Stan sighs, “he lays all the blame on Patty. It’s like she can’t do anything right in his eyes, ever. And her family is so...the first time we went to see them together, when she introduced them to me I almost started crying. They were so nice to me. They didn’t give a shit who my dad was or that I didn’t take over the synagogue from him. They were just like, you love our daughter? That’s all that matters. But my family won’t do that for her and she has to, what, just put up with that?”

Richie thinks of his own parents and of Eddie’s mom. He thinks of all of their parents. Bev’s and Ben’s and Bills, and Mike’s lack thereof. The myriad ways in which they were failed by the adults in their lives as kids.

“She shouldn’t have to,” he agrees, one palm flat on the top of the kitchen table. “But we all have things. We all have baggage. It’s not about being so perfect for the other person that being together is smooth sailing. It’s finding someone who looks at you and then looks at all the things you’re carrying and thinks, okay, this is someone worth sharing it all with. The good and the bad.”

Stan’s sharp intake of breath is muffled over the phone, but still audible. “I know you’re right,” he says, “but I still feel bad.”

“I know.” Richie imagines Eddie upstairs, asleep by now, with a weight on his shoulders that he can’t carry alone. Some of that weight feels like an addition Richie himself has added, even if by accident. “Um. On a different note, I might have like...told Eddie I’ve been in love with him since high school.”

“You might have? How is that something you can be unsure of?” Stan sounds unreasonably gleeful at the opportunity to shift the conversation somewhere else at this point.

“Okay, I _ did, _ is that what you want to hear?”

“Maybe! I don’t know! How did it go?”

“He asked me to bring him back here and then fell asleep,” Richie admits, remembering the slump of Eddie’s head against his chest and how good of a feeling that was.

“Romantic,” Stan says, deadpan. “And you haven’t discussed it?”

“Well.” Richie doesn’t have an answer for that. “It’s been sort of a whirlwind since. I had a couple more shows to do after that and it was like, before I knew it, we were on our way to Maine. And now that we’re here I feel pretty confident of one thing.”

“Which is?”

“This place fucking blows.”

Stan laughs at that like it’s actually funny and it strikes Richie how his laugh hasn’t changed much at all. How he’s still Stan Uris, just farther away and with a job he goes to every day instead of a school. How that’s true for all of them.

“That’s Derry for you,” Stan says, sounding deadly serious for a second before he lets out one last hiccuping laugh. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Taking Eddie out for ice cream, I think.”

“Twist and Dip?” There’s a note of surprise in Stan’s voice. “Is that place even open right now?”

“I’ll take him to a goddamn Dairy Queen if I have to.” Richie pushes his chair back and winces at the scraping sound. “It’s not really about the ice cream, Stan.” He pauses and brings a hand to his cheek, scratching at the stubble on his cheek. “Are you, are you gonna be okay?”

“Yeah, I mean—this is gonna sound cheesy—”

“Cheese away.”

“It’s just...if it wasn’t for you and everyone else, I’d really only have Patty. And as has already been established, she’s perfect for me. But then I’d either be putting this all on her alone or I’d be keeping it all inside and neither of those things would be good. So. I’ll be okay, but if it wasn’t for you guys I don’t know if that would be true.”

When Richie is about to cry, his face gets warm and his eyes burn. His chest clenches up and he feels frozen in place. He can’t move and he doesn’t know what to say, but he forces himself to say something anyway.

“You do, though, you do have us,” he manages to get out.

After they end the call, he sits in the kitchen by himself for a while longer, watching the shadows move over the cracks in the ceiling and wondering just how different everything could have been, for all of them.

—

The Twist and Dip is closed.

Not just for the season, but permanently. The paint is peeling and the benches are gone, and there’s a sign in the window that says _ Thank you for 27 delicious years, Derry! _

Richie and Eddie stand on the sidewalk, hands in their jacket pockets, staring at the building like it has personally offended them. There’s dead grass and weeds growing through the cracks in the concrete and two of the front windows are shattered.

“We shouldn’t have moved away,” Richie laments, “if we’d stayed, they would still be open.”

“Two vanilla ice cream cones every day of the summer for twenty years, uh, yeah,” Eddie agrees, “we would have single-handedly fueled their economic prosperity. I could have worked with them on franchising.”

“I will never say it again,” Richie says solemnly, “but I take full responsibility for this.”

“Some people have no respect for history.” Eddie seems genuinely upset, more than Richie would have imagined. It’s a piece of their childhood, certainly, but now it’s nothing more than an empty building around which they played out parts of their life. Richie doesn’t feel upset so much as he feels disappointed.

If asked, he’s not sure he could put it into words. The best he can do is: when he used to ride his bike past this place he’d feel a heady mixture of shame and excitement in his stomach. He’d feel the same way when he saw Eddie across the street, avoiding him. He’d remember the taste of his lips. And he’s never forgotten any of that, but he’ll never remember it in quite the same way ever again.

“Whatever,” Eddie says, “I have a better idea. Come on.”

He surprises Richie by ignoring all posted and unposted traffic laws and jaywalking, leading them into one of the alleys they traversed as kids on their bikes, and into the sudden and sprawling expanse of woods just past the downtown. It’s more of a hike than Richie remembers, and neither of them are wearing the right shoes for it, but they eventually emerge in a familiar, rock-strewn area.

“Drum roll,” Eddie commands.

Richie does his best with just his hands against his thighs and finishes with a flourish.

“The Barrens!” Eddie declares, sweeping a hand towards the clearing in front of them. “Sort of. I think.”

“Good enough,” Richie shrugs, crouching down to grab one of the rocks on the ground. He holds it up in front of his face. “Less wet than I remember, but good enough.”

Eddie makes a noise of agreement and starts circling some of the nearby trees for no apparent reason. “Yeah, this isn’t exactly where we all used to come but—ah, found it. Get over here.”

Richie should probably be embarrassed by how fast he makes it over to stand shoulder to shoulder with Eddie, but he can’t find it within himself to conjure up the emotion necessary. “What am I looking at?” he asks, cocking his head to the side and squinting. If he had to guess, he’d say someone, maybe a kid without much foresight, carved a squiggly line into the tree.

“Well, there was that day behind the Twist and Dip, where um—”

“I kissed you and you ran away,” Richie says, hoping Eddie doesn’t notice the way his voice wavers. “I know what you mean.”

“Right, so this is where I went. When I ran away.” Eddie traces the squiggle with his pinky finger. It looks a little like a worm. “It was supposed to be an R...or an E? I can’t remember. But it was way harder than I thought it would be to carve into the bark. So I just sat down and cried.”

“In the _ dirt? _” Richie can’t hide his shock. “You?”

Eddie nods and doesn’t look at him. “Yeah, and then I-I...I don’t know. I went home and I thought alright, what’s the best way to deal with this? And I was stupid and scared so I decided the best way to deal with it was to never have to look at you again.”

Richie swallows down what he wants to say, hard. “Yeah. I remember that part.” He takes a few steps back.

“Rich,” Eddie says, so plainly it’s difficult to watch. Now he turns to look at Richie, eyes full of hurt. “I was a kid.”

“So was I!” Richie doesn’t mean to yell it, but he does and he hears the rush of a flock of birds leave a nearby tree. “Did you ever think about that, Eddie? That I was stupid and scared, too? That I kissed my best friend behind the fucking Twist and Dip and he left me alone and I still—I still told myself okay, it’ll be fine. He’ll show up in the morning like always. And then you _ didn’t? _”

Eddie doesn’t look how he expected, angry and contrary. He looks like a kid in the woods, with wide eyes and a small frame. He’s tiny amongst the bare tree branches that surround them, all reaching out like arms desperate to be held.

“Um, yeah, Richie. I’ve thought about that a lot.”

Richie can already feel his pent up anger deflating. He’s never able to hold onto the emotion for long. “Okay, but—but sometimes it feels like people don’t get it. Like, oh, I’m sure Richie’s fine. He only pretended he wasn’t gay for his entire life. I’m sure he’s alright. I’m sure none of that bothered him, because he’s such a swell guy. He’s so fucking funny. He’ll be fine, because he can laugh about it!”

“I don’t think that,” Eddie says, so quietly it almost gets lost between them.

“What?”

“I don’t think that, Richie. Maybe when I was a kid I _ told _ myself that so I felt less awful for pulling away from you, but I don’t think any of that and I never have.” Eddie has his arms crossed against his chest and it hurts to look at him.

Richie’s never been able to explain what it is about Eddie, even to himself, but he sees it clearly in this moment. The slant of light through the trees and the way Eddie is staring him down. No one else would dare.

It’s something about the set of his shoulders and the slope of his nose, the way he spits words out like bullets. The way he just _ says _ things. Richie feels safe in the relentless honesty that a life with Eddie promises him, knows that Eddie would never actually hit him while he’s down.

He’s seen it before in Eddie’s eyes, yeah. This will hurt. This won’t be easy. But I will love you.

He’s seen that and Eddie’s not the only one who’s done his fair share of running away.

When Eddie came back to him at the end of the summer, two days before he left for Indiana, talking about writing letters and keeping in touch and maybe, maybe, maybe—Richie was the one who said thanks, but no thanks.

He thinks his exact words were, _ I can’t deal with someone who can’t be honest about who he is. _

Teenage bravado being what it was, he regretted it all the way to his new home, thought of it in empty moments over the years, and neither forgot nor forgave himself for the way Eddie looked in the aftermath. Kids, stupid and scared. That’s all either of them ever were back then.

“Thank you,” Richie says, his voice scratching his throat on the way up, “but you’re probably the only one.” He feels the same way he felt last night, talking to Stan in the kitchen. He wonders if this is what being an adult is, if it’s just this over and over again.

“No, no way.” Each step Eddie takes over the underbrush is accompanied by a crunching sound until he’s right in front of Richie. He doesn’t seem sad now, just worried and cold. “I know a couple of other people who don’t feel that way. You should talk to them some time, about all of this.”

Richie feels stupid now, sniffling in the woods at looking at Eddie. He says, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eddie repeats, a smile forming on his lips. “And even if it is just me, I’ll feel that way enough for a hundred people. I might give myself a hernia, but I’ll fucking do it.”

“Thanks.” Richie’s voice is watery and embarrassing and not the way he likes to sound in front of anyone. He guesses he can make an exception for Eddie. “Um, but just so you know I successfully carved our initials somewhere.”

“What?” Eddie reaches out and grabs the end of the scarf around Richie’s neck, something that’s become a habit of his in the past few days. “Where? Wait—_no. _”

“Yeah.” Richie gestures vaguely back towards the direction they came from. “Kissing Bridge, baby.”

“Before or after?” Eddie sounds breathless, like Richie’s telling him he went and pulled the moon down from the sky and has it to give to him.

“Oh, way before.” Richie stumbles closer, into Eddie’s space. “The _ summer _ before, if you can believe it. I had a whole year of waiting to do.”

“A whole year,” Eddie says, apparently fascinated by the concept.

“I mean, don’t get too excited.” Richie leans his head down and watches as Eddie’s hand grips the scarf. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He feels fourteen again, has felt fourteen since they arrived in town. “What’d really be crazy is if I waited _ twenty _ years.”

Eddie doesn’t even bother responding. He uses the scarf to pull Richie down to his open mouth, and Richie closes his eyes and sees it all. Twenty years, the day they first kissed, the wood of the bridge under his hands as he carved their initials like a ritual. Their first kiss was chaste and fumbling, simple in the way things like that always are.

Now, Richie feels the need to make up for lost time. He kisses Eddie like they’re underwater, like he needs to do it to breathe. His tongue against Eddie’s teeth and Eddie turning his head to the side at just the right angle. He tastes like coffee, not ice cream, and he feels like the boy Richie has loved since before he knew what love was.

Richie pulls away and can’t help himself, he kisses Eddie again on the lips, and then again after a second’s hesitation.

Neither of them say anything.

In the distance, a bird sings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gay people are like: *goes to their hometown* *remembers traumatic experience from gym class* *kisses their first love in the woods*
> 
> questions, comments, concerns? leave them below. i would love to hear what you think!


	6. v.

_ Outside your bedroom window, the leaves are changing colors. _

_ You hear the phone ring downstairs and you know it’s not for you. Some afternoons you ride your bike around the block, stopping to try and talk to kids you’ve seen around. None of them laugh at your jokes and you pedal away, skin-kneed and unsure of yourself. _

_ It’s awkward now, but in a couple of months you’ll stop getting letters from the east coast and by next year you’ll be insulated by this town. _

_ Still, it will never be yours the way Derry was and there will never be another kid who stands at your side, elbowing you in the ribs, and calling you names. No one here will stop your bleeding when you most need it. No one here will make you laugh so hard your sides hurt, for so long you forget about everything that ever hurt you. _

_ The years pass like days and you keep a strip of photobooth pictures pressed between the pages of a book, four shots in a line of faces you never meant to forget but did. _

—

The drive back to New York feels like the inside of a dream, faded at the edges and cotton candy sweet. Richie sings along to love songs and points to Eddie when the lyrics say _ you_, and then back at himself when the singer croons out _ me_.

They stop at a red light in the downtown of a modest city and Eddie says, “Stay still,” before reaching out and fixing some of Richie’s untamed hair. The touch makes Richie feel electric less because of the physicality of it and more because he remembers wanting Eddie to do something similar when they were fourteen, back when he hadn’t known why the idea of another boy running a hand through his hair made it hard for him to breathe.

“Do I look handsome?” he asks.

Eddie scoffs and shrugs and has a little smile on his face which is answer enough.

Richie thinks this really might be it, the point of it all. Driving down the highway between towns he’s never heard of, buildings passing by and the sky dark overhead as Eddie explains the pros and cons of vitamin supplements.

His parents used to argue in a way that meant they couldn’t stand each other and Richie would flinch at the weight of the words they threw around. He thinks that’s what makes the ribbing he throws Eddie’s way different. His statements are featherlight, a sort of pillow fight they’ve been stuck in since middle school. A sleepover where they fight to stay awake long after everyone else has fallen asleep.

“Eddie,” he can imagine saying one night, everyone asleep on the floor of his basement. “Eds, are you still awake?”

And Eddie always was, bleary-eyed and unwilling to miss a second of the time they spent together.

So little has changed.

They check back in to the same hotel they left three days ago and fall into bed at just after three in the morning. Richie kisses Eddie twice on the lips and once on the cheek before falling asleep. He can’t remember the exact distribution in the morning, only that Eddie mumbled his name and told him to stop being so loud.

The ensuing weekend is fast paced and full to bursting. Richie has two more shows to do and Eddie has a work emergency come to light that has him on the phone throughout most of Saturday. This seems patently unfair to Richie, considering Eddie took the week off, but he also suspects that his concept of how vacations function for salaried workers might not be the most accurate. Still, he's pretty sure you aren't supposed to spend hours at a time fixing other people's mistakes when you're not even on the clock.

Their contact that weekend comes through brief, tactile moments where one of them is passing through the other’s space. Richie trails his fingers over Eddie’s shoulder as he heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth and Eddie grabs Richie’s wrist as if to check his pulse before taking a call out to the hallway.

On Sunday, Eddie comes to Richie’s last show, an anonymous face in the darkness.

Richie keeps his head on throughout his set by pretending Eddie is the only one there. He tells himself they’re just kids in his basement again, the two of them wrapped up in a cocoon of blankets, saying things they'll forget about when the morning comes around. It has a strong effect on how he delivers the material. There's an inescapable fondness taking over his tone as he describes the shape of his feelings in the presence of this boy, all grown up now, who's side he never wants to leave again.

This show, more than anything he’s ever done before, feels like a living, breathing thing. It’s the difference between a memorized script and an improvised scene, and with Eddie as the only one in the crowd he can feel himself tapping into something deeper. It’s the well of desperation Eddie inspires in him, this deep need to be seen and understood by someone who he wants to see and understand him.

It’s always been that way between the two of them, Richie tripping over himself to get a reaction, any reaction, out of Eddie. And Eddie, his worst and best critic, never fails to give it to him.

“How was it?” he asks when they’re getting ready to leave, just the two of them standing backstage.

“You weren’t lying when you said you left out the funny parts last time,” Eddie says. He looks pretty in the lighting backstage. Pretty. It’s not a word Richie would use for Eddie normally, but can’t help but think now because of the way his face is thrown into contrast. The line of his shoulders is taut and his eyes are warm and Richie allows himself to think it now, yes, Eddie is pretty and Richie wants to lick a stripe up his neck and push him into a wall. He wants to see if he can taste the lotion Eddie rubs into his skin every night or if there's something else, something more real.

He doesn't think Eddie understands this and he also doesn't know how to communicate it without the equilibrium between them toppling like a house of cards piled too high.

“Yeah?” he manages to say in response, the only word that seems safe.

“Mmmh.” Eddie wets his lips and Richie wishes he could read minds in this singular moment. “But the way you described me—was that really how you saw me?”

“Yes,” Richie replies, without hesitation. 

“It’s just weird to think.” Eddie looks away, holding his jacket in his arms like a security blanket. “That anyone would have looked at me like that then. Or now.”

“I’ve always looked at you that way. I still do.”

Eddie breathes in sharply at that and Richie can’t tell why. Part of him thinks Eddie might eat him alive in this cramped, backstage corridor. Another part thinks he might devour him in another way entirely.

What he does is sigh fondly and look Richie up and down.

“We have a flight in the morning.”

“We do,” Richie agrees.

They make their flight and Richie has a hickey on his shoulder, the deep purple color of which matches the bags under Eddie’s eyes.

—

The air shifts as their flight lands at LAX and Eddie pushes his hand away at baggage claim.

“Don’t,” he says, before stepping forward to claim his navy suitcase, pristine and with his initials stitched on the front.

The tension is a third passenger in the ride back to their apartment and Richie tips well to make up for the obvious discomfort they cause their driver.

As they head upstairs, he’s reminded of the summer after their first kiss, despite the fact that they’re together. He thinks it’s in the way Eddie seems ready to bolt at a moment’s notice, and he wonders what this game is and which of them decided they were playing it.

With the front door flung open and their suitcases deposited in their rooms, Richie watches Eddie return to the kitchen and start pulling bottles of liquor down from off the top of the fridge. He moves around the kitchen frantically, grabbing glasses and covering the counter in drink options.

“Are we having a party I don’t know about?” he asks, aiming to sound more like he’s joking than like he’s hurt. He’s adept at covering up the latter, but the flip side of the coin in this situation is that Eddie knows the difference better than almost anyone.

“No, I just—” Eddie stops where he is, closes his eyes, and then presses his fingers against his eyelids. “Sorry.”

“No need to apologize to me.” Richie glances at the drink set up as he sits down at the kitchen island. “Apologize to whoever you were going to serve the blueberry vodka to. That stuff is nasty, babe.”

Eddie huffs out a laugh. His arms drop to his sides. “I must seem crazy.”

“Not anymore than usual.”

Richie wants to reach out and hold him, but can tell now isn’t a good time for that. Eddie reminds him of a porcupine when he gets like this, bristling at the suggestion of touch, needing his space, fully prepared to hurt anyone who comes too close. Richie is fine with navigating this particular nuance of Eddie’s personality, but he’s unsure of where it's coming from right now.

“It’s stupid.” Eddie puts his palms flat against the countertop as if to steady himself.

“It’s not,” Richie replies. There's no doubt in his mind. He knows that even if the reason is ridiculous and unwarranted, it’s not stupid. Not if it’s making Eddie feel the way he clearly is.

Eddie seems momentarily taken aback, which hurts Richie to see. It makes him wonder how his emotions and reservations were treated by Myra, though he supposes he saw a fraction of the answer to that question last week.

“It’s not that I don’t want—this.” Eddie gestures between the two of them, over the sea of liquor bottles and empty glasses. “It’s that I don’t know how to have it and not hate myself. Fuck. I know it makes no sense.”

Richie shakes his head. “It’s not that. I just want to understand. Because in the Barrens and at the hotel…”

He can still feel the bite of Eddie’s teeth against the skin of his shoulder and he feels reasonably certain Eddie can still remember the taste of it.

“Rich,” Eddie says, in a way that makes Richie desperate to count the light freckles across the bridge of his nose. To do something tender and meaningless, something he's wanted to do for years. “You know this place is home to me now, right? At first it was just a guest room in the apartment of an old friend, a place I would stay for less than a year before I went back to my real home. My real life. My real relationship.”

Richie feels like he’s been punched in the stomach three times in quick succession. He also knows Eddie doesn’t mean for it to feel that way. But it does. It knocks the air out of him.

“And now I’m realizing _ none _ of that was true,” Eddie continues, “and yes, I-I started to realize that when we were away from here. But Derry has never felt all there to me. And New York isn’t home anymore. So none of it felt real.”

“Okay,” Richie says, trying and failing not to take any of this personally.

“It’s not—it isn’t anything you’ve done. Or haven’t done.” The lights flash against the glass of the bottles as Richie leans to the side so some of his hair falls into his eyes. Eddie is dragging his hands against the countertop, in search of something to hold onto. “It’s me. This fucked up, twisted thing in my chest. This part of me that can’t figure out if I’m more scared of being unhappy with a woman for the rest of my life, or of being happy with a man. And that part of me flinches away when you reach for my hand in the airport of the state we live in. That part of me doesn’t know if I can do this in a place that feels this real.”

Richie lets out a measured breath and swipes his fingers under his eye. “Okay,” he repeats, “I can understand that. I don’t love it because I want. Well. You know what I want.”

“I don’t,” Eddie says, “that’s part of the problem. You assume that I know. But I don’t.”

Richie doesn’t know how to put it into words. He wants Eddie on top of and under freshly washed sheets. He wants Eddie’s skin against his, the rasp of his own unshaven cheek against Eddie’s thigh. He wants to reach for his hand in public and have Eddie’s fingers clumsily interlock with his own for the thousandth time, neither of them thinking about it. He wants to live in the shade of the cross that he and Eddie bear together—the weight of it thrown across their shoulders equally.

Most of all, he wants to have to words to say all of this out loud, a prospect which scares him but no longer seems impossible the way it did a year ago.

“I love you, Eddie,” he says, taking it all in. “I thought you knew.”

“No.” Eddie’s voice cracks. “No, how would I?”

“Come here,” Richie says, unable to look at Eddie with this distance between them. Sometimes he wonders how he went twenty years without knowing how many miles were between the two of them. It seems like such a pertinent thing, now, and he counts the steps it takes for Eddie to stand in front of him.

He puts his hand out as an offer.

Eddie reaches out and their fingers brush before he presses their palms together.

“Is this okay?” Richie asks.

Eddie nods, looking more disheveled than Richie has ever seen him. Hair ungelled and shoulders shaking.

“Yes,” he says. “I can—I can do this and—”

He leans down the fraction of an inch it takes for him to reach Richie’s mouth, capturing his lips in a kiss that causes Richie to momentarily forget himself. Eyes closed, he could half-believe they’re back in a hotel bed.

“I want this, too,” Eddie says when they part, barely any space between them. The words feel written on Richie’s skin, the need in every syllable slipping between the fabric of his clothes. “I just need time.”

Richie, jet-lagged and drunk on the way Eddie tastes against his tongue, says, “As long as you need."

And what surprises him is how much he means it.

—

Richie had been sure they would share a bedroom when they got back to California. He imagined hauling Eddie’s full-size mattress out to the dumpster and reclaiming his office space in a frenzy of activity, their lives forever changed by one afternoon in their hometown. But Eddie’s room remains the same, except for the fact that it’s empty some nights.

After a month or so, Richie can tell which nights they’ll spend together and which they won’t. Sometimes Eddie gets home late, sometimes he has more work he needs to do after dinner, and sometimes he just seems jumpy, uncomfortable with being touched and distant.

Richie suspects that ten years ago he would have felt slighted and taken it personally. He’d been at his height of self-absorption in his early twenties, developing a dependence on coke and an aversion to therapy that would last for half a decade. As it is, he’s had two phone sessions with his therapist a week since their plane landed, and he finds himself more worried for Eddie than anything, hating the self-imposed isolation he seems to be using as a punishment for himself.

It makes him appreciate the nights where Eddie leans against his shoulder and asks if they can go to sleep. On those nights, Eddie gets into bed before Richie can, and he spreads out across the entire mattress.

“I’ll push you on the floor,” Richie says, turning out the lights and turning on his fan.

“No you won’t.” Eddie’s voice is muffled by the pillow he has his face buried in.

He’s right. Richie won’t.

It’s around the time that they’re on a hot three-day streak, when Richie realizes he hasn’t talked to his agent since he was in New York.

“You haven’t talked to him at all?” Eddie calls from the bathroom, where he’s using cotton balls to put something on his face that Richie thinks is called toner. He’s trying to learn and not doing a terrible job, by Eddie’s own admission.

“I’ve had calls from some other people at his office,” Richie says, scrolling through his email app on his bed. He has the door to his room thrown open. “But he hasn’t talked to me personally, which is odd. Usually after a string of shows like that he’d want to schedule something in person to go over revenue and next steps, but instead I got that information from an email.”

“He could be busy,” Eddie offers. “But a month—that seems excessive.”

“Yeah.” Richie flops back on his bed and raises his voice. “The meetings are kind of boring so at first it was a relief. But it’s starting to feel weird. Like he’s avoiding me.”

“Maybe it’s because you smell like moldy underwear,” Eddie says. There’s an accompanying creak of the floorboards, which means he’s leaving the bathroom and heading into Richie’s room.

“I think you’re remembering what your mom smelled like and projecting it onto me,” Richie replies.

A pillow falls on top of his face. He grabs it by the corner and pulls it off, craning his head back. He sees Eddie, whose face is shiny and pink, upside down as he pushes himself up on the bed.

Internally, Richie adds another mark to his tally. It’s a four-day streak now. Something you could almost call a pattern, a regular occurrence, a slow trust-fall into normalcy.

“Call him,” upside down Eddie says as he settles into position, back against the headboard and legs stretched out in front of him.

Richie rolls over and moves closer, resting his head on Eddie’s thigh.

“I will.”

At night, Eddie smells like laundry detergent and orange blossom-scented lotion. He can’t hold Richie’s hand in public yet, but he will play with Richie’s hair when they lay together like this. He’ll initiate couch makeout sessions when commercials come on and last week he even humped himself into completion against Richie’s thigh.

He’d been embarrassed for all of five seconds, and then said, “Actually it’s kind of exciting. I’ve never done that before.”

Richie had pushed him back against the couch cushions and promised to make it happen again.

For now, though, he’s content to feel Eddie’s nails against his scalp, just the right side of painful.

“Are you staying?” he asks, half-asleep and struck with the worry that strikes him every night. The fear that he’ll wake up and Eddie will be gone, the door to his own bedroom shut tight. He never gets mad, never even wants to, but this closeness means more to him than he can put into words.

“Yes, be quiet,” Eddie says, sternly.

It makes Richie smile, the tacit way in which Eddie approaches all things. The fourth night in a row, and all the things that might come after.

He dreams of all of them as children, the only friends he’s ever had in a place they’ve never been. A carnival with flashing lights and sugar-laden treats. The mirror-filled funhouse, and Eddie’s hand in his. How different things might have been if that was their childhood. Sharing a seat on the ferris wheel, Mike and Bill waving at them from up above.

When they disembark, they’re adults, and Richie hesitates before reaching out to Eddie.

But among the crowd, Eddie takes his hand and smiles at him, and they’re lost in the night and there’s nothing to fear.

When he wakes, all Richie will remember is the warmth of another hand in his own and the way that made him feel.

Eddie hasn’t said it yet, but Richie knows.

—

Calling his agent gets him nothing but a voicemail recording and then an automated message telling him the voicemail box is full.

He’s calling while the apartment is empty, pacing around the living room and trying not to have a panic attack. He’d thought he was done with panic attacks, but apparently they’re not so much a thing you get rid of as a lion lying in wait, ready to pounce the second he lets his guard down. His throat feels tight and he isn’t quite at the point that he can’t breathe, but he’s getting there.

Waiting what he hopes is an appropriate amount of time before calling back, he thumbs through the apps on his phone before pulling up the groupchat.

_ Beep “Beep” Richard: _anyone have anything that always makes them laugh

He paces for another half a minute before his phone buzzes.

_ Beverly Marsh: _You!

It’s a stupid, cheesy joke and he says as much in reply, but it also makes his eyes well up with tears. The ensuing messages from Bev, Bill, and Mike—the only people who seem to be around at the moment—are much the same. Bill sends a YouTube compilation of Richie’s own jokes and Mike sends a link to a Facebook group that posts farmer memes.

Five minutes later, Richie has calmed down enough to try calling again, and he avoids what had previously felt like an inevitable breakdown when he’s once again sent to his agent’s full voicemail.

Instead of wallowing, he calls Beverly and is instantly warmed by the unique color of her voice.

“How’s my favorite boy?” she says by way of greeting.

“That can’t possibly be true.” He opens the door to the apartment’s comically small balcony, just big enough for a sad, little chair to fit snugly between the wall and the railing.

“It can and it is!” She sounds indignant that he would try to correct her on this, and perhaps rightly so. He missed all of them in the intervening years, but he missed time spent with Beverly the most. Even going to the movies with her had been fun, whispering commentary to each other and sneaking in candy from Keene’s.

He’d envied the color of her hair and her bravery and he'd loved the way she’d say his name, exasperated but with a smile. As a kid, he’d mistaken it for a crush, but now he knows he was jealous of her and the seeming ease with which she was herself. In reality, he suspects that they were both performing for one another back then. Playing out a kind of movie of their own, reading the only scripts they could get their hands on in the loudest voices they could muster.

He tells Beverly things he hasn’t told anyone else. He leans over the railing as he describes the way Eddie kisses and watches as a fire engine screams by as he fills her in on what happened on the east coast. By the time he gets to the fact that his agent is currently AWOL, he feels physically drained.

“Wow,” Beverly says, when he goes silent. “Stan wasn’t kidding when he said you should talk in the groupchat more.”

Richie breathes out a sound caught between a laugh and a sigh. “Yeah. Maybe. I’ll tell everyone about my agent, that’s fine. But Eddie’s shit is Eddie’s shit. I can’t drop that without making sure he’s okay with it first. And he’s not. Okay with it, I mean.”

“Hmm.” He can hear Beverly pacing, the sound of the heels of whatever shoes she’s wearing _ clicking _ against the floor of the room she’s in. “I understand. But you’re telling me?”

“I have to tell someone,” Richie admits. It’s begun to make him feel stir crazy. He just wants one night where they go out together. “I’ve even suggested we go to, you know, WeHo or whatever. No one would care there.”

He’s thought about it enough for the picture to come to mind, unbidden. Mid-summer in LA would mean they’d be in shorts and t-shirts, or maybe Eddie would dress up a little more. Richie wouldn’t mind. They’d pick somewhere kitschy and cute and no one would look at them twice. There’d be a candle on their table and Richie would annoy Eddie by placing his palm directly above the flame. Their food wouldn’t be as good as they’d hope for, but it would be okay.

They could try a different place next weekend.

“It sounds like Eddie would.” Beverly’s gentle reminder is enough to snap Richie back to reality. He swallows down whatever emotion the thought of Eddie sitting across from him, framed in the artful low lighting of a hypothetical restaurant, was causing to well up in his chest.

“I think what’s fucking me up is that we went out in New York, Bev. And he held my hand there. He called it a date and I told him we should put a pin in that—wait until after he broke up with Myra. And now that he has, it’s like...one step forward, _ ten _ steps back.”

He pushes a hand back through his hair and peers over the railing again. No emergency services vehicles this time, just normal traffic and guitar player busking for passers-by, a song being played so far away he has to strain to hear the notes.

“He’ll get there, Richie,” Beverly says, words unwavering.

“How do you know?” Richie asks, casting a glance towards the glass doors as he sees movement inside the apartment. It’s Eddie getting home, earlier than usual. He waves and holds up a finger to indicate he’ll just be a minute.

“You’re not the only one I talk to, you know,” Beverly says in a way that lets Richie hear the smile forming on her face. “I hear the way he talks about you, too.”

Richie ends the call and heads inside, where he’s instantly hit by the smell of carry out, ground beef, fresh tortillas, and the harsh cut of a spice he doesn’t know the name of.

“Home early?” he asks, crowding Eddie’s space in the kitchen and still stupid enough to be pleasantly surprised when Eddie answers him with a kiss. He only manages to make their mouths half line up, catching Richie’s cheek more than anything, but it doesn’t matter. It being perfect has never been the point.

“Mm, yeah, I told them I didn’t feel well,” Eddie says, popping what looks like a cherry tomato into his mouth.

“You told them you didn’t feel good, left to get Mexican, and then came home to get an early start on the weekend?” Richie asks, raising his eyebrows. It’s not a distinctly un-Eddie thing to do, but it's definitely a rarity. He can count the number of times Eddie skipped class in grade school on one hand, but every single time there was a good reason.

Eddie shrugs and grabs another tomato from the bag. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

Richie watches as he starts to open the bags he brought in, setting about making plates for both of them. He went to a local place, not too far from their apartment building and got their usual. Quesadillas and picadillo tacos and more sauce than they could ever actually need.

He follows Eddie to their kitchen table, which has one wobbly leg and is probably due to be replaced but has been with them so long it would feel like a betrayal. Once they’re settled down, he makes a point of hooking one of his socked feet around Eddie’s ankle and is rewarded with a sigh and no sign of Eddie moving away.

Halfway through his first taco he says, “Something is wrong.”

Eddie sips at his water and wipes a napkin against his lips. “You think so?”

“Yes.” Richie looks Eddie over, from the loosened tie to the way his nail cuticles aren’t pushed back. “Do you want me to carry you back to the bedroom? I can fuck it out of you.”

“Jesus.” Eddie coughs into his napkin and tries to hide the way his face turns red. “It’s not—I don’t think that would help.”

“You won’t know until you try,” Richie points out, enjoying the way Eddie avoids his eyes but doesn’t look upset. Just embarrassed and, possibly, like he’s considering it.

“Can we table this whole discussion? Put it on the list of things we need to get back to another time?” Eddie asks after a pregnant pause.

Richie mimes writing in the air. “Consider it tabled. I’m still happy to carry you back to the bedroom, though. No fucking required.”

Eddie throws a cherry tomato at him. Richie picks it up, and eats it.

—

It’s another week before Richie gets a response from his agent. He’s frustrated reading the email, which is a reply to one of the half dozen Richie has sent in the past month. It tells him nothing he doesn’t already know and its only saving grace is the last sentence.

_ Let me know when you’re free to meet - we should talk about your future. _

Richie thinks yeah, no shit, but types up a response that’s considerably more cordial and sends it along.

It isn’t until later that night that he realizes the message has settled into his stomach like a fish hook, something he was too dumb to notice until it pulled him from the water. He ends up in the bathroom at two in the morning, splashing water on his face and trying not to hyperventilate.

“Richie?” Eddie is in the doorway, squinting in the light. “What’re you doing?”

“Nothing,” Richie says, far too quickly. “Sorry. I couldn’t sleep so I just—I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“I have my own bed,” Eddie reminds him, leaning his shoulder against the door jamb. “If that’s the problem, you don’t have to give up your room.”

Richie looks at Eddie, black hair tousled and eyelashes stuck together with sleep. He’s got an old concert t-shirt on and Richie wonders when that happened, when their clothes started to get mixed up in the wash and when Eddie stopped caring enough to put something of Richie's on so casually. He looks good in it. In everything. And Richie wants to cry at the idea that he'd think Richie doesn't want him in his bed.

“That’s not the problem,” he says, feeling his voice crack on the way up his throat. He stumbles backwards and ends up sitting on the closed toilet seat, dropping his face into his hands and trying to remember how to breathe.

“Hey,” he hears Eddie’s voice above him, colored with exhaustion and oddly soothing. “Hey, I’m here.”

Eddie stands in front of him and pulls Richie to him, Richie’s head against his midsection, hands on Richie’s shoulders.

Against him, face hidden, Richie falls apart. He lets out a shuddering breath that turns into a sob and then can’t stop himself from crying. He’s overwhelmed and feels like he knows what’s coming. His entire career ruined and this wasn’t how it was supposed to work. He was supposed to be honest with himself and be rewarded for it, not punished. 

“He’s going,” Richie breathes out shakily, “to drop me.”

“Who?” Eddie asks, using the same tone of voice he once would have used if Richie had been decked behind the school. Like all five feet of him was going to go bite off Henry Bowers’ ear in retribution.

“My agent,” Richie replies. It hit him in waves throughout the evening, the realization bowling him over in a way it never should have been able to. He’s so stupid for not seeing it sooner. The lack of contact, no response to calls or email, until today. Until _ we should talk about your future. _

He knows he's hurtling forward, past what he can possibly know for sure, but his intuition rarely fails him even when it hits him like an errant bolt of lightning in the dark of night.

“Oh, baby,” Eddie murmurs and despite it all, Richie’s heart beats a little faster at that. His hands shake against Eddie’s sides. “He’s an idiot if he does that. You’re only just getting started.”

Richie lets out a gasping laugh and is hit violently with the thought that he couldn’t deal with this if he was alone. He imagines himself in this bathroom, shaking on the floor, not being held—and he doesn’t know where that ends. He doesn’t know who he would have talked to about this, about any of this, if Stan hadn’t message him last fall, if Eddie hadn’t crashed into his life, if there wasn’t some part of him that knows he has people who care about him no matter what.

Even worse, he thinks the truth of the matter is that if none of these people had re-entered his life, he wouldn’t be crying in this bathroom. He’d never had written the material he did for the shows in New York. He would be pushing forty in five years and telling the same jokes he’s always told. Nothing would have changed.

He’d be the guy he never wanted to be, numb to it all and unwilling to look in the mirror. He sees the trajectory of this almost-life stretched out in front of him like a roll of film, each picture darker than the last.

This—being held by Eddie, his face wet and his chest heaving, no doubt in his mind about what’s going to happen—this hurts. It's the sort of hurt he struggles to quantify, because it's so prescient in the moment, so keen and sharp and undeniable. It hurts because he knows that if he had kept the truth inside, things would have been worse, but it's not like this is easy.

“Do you know wh-why?” Eddie asks from above him, and Richie can hear him fighting back a yawn.

“I can guess,” Richie says, closing his eyes and taking it all in. For a second, he’s able to convince himself everything is fine and he wants to _ live _ in that second. Everything subsides and there’s only the smell of Eddie, the feeling of Eddie’s hand in his hair, the softness of Eddie’s skin.

“It’s 2010, they can’t just—”

“They won’t say it’s because I’m gay, they’re not stupid. But they’ll find something, some technicality. I won’t be the first person it’s happened to, or the last.”

The silence in the room stretches on for so long Richie starts to notice that they’ve fallen into the same breathing pattern, something which soothes him even as he can feel himself shifting towards anger. It’s a slow process, extracting himself from Eddie’s arms and sitting back so they’re looking each other in the eye.

“This is fucked up,” he says, at the same time that Eddie says something, voice harsh and drowned out by the rush of blood in Richie’s ears. “Sorry?”

“I said I quit my job.” Each word is its own, staccato beat that hits Richie hard across the face.

“You—?”

“I quit my fucking job!” Eddie repeats, falling into nervous laughter as he says it. “I went in to my supervisor’s office and I said I can’t keep working ten hour days and they said everyone who cares about the company does it and I said, I fucking said, well then I must not give a shit about this company. And I quit and came home with Mexican food!”

Richie finds himself at a loss, taken aback, but not as surprised as he should be. Eddie talks about work rarely and when he does, he speaks like it’s a necessary evil, the means to an end. He knows that’s how work is for some people and has never held it against anyone, but it doesn’t shock him that Eddie would want to quit—it’s more the fact that he _did. _

“Have you just been pretending to go?” he asks, trying to remember what the last week has looked like. He can’t say anything has seemed out of the ordinary from his perspective, but he’s also been consumed by his own spectacular career-related tailspin.

He wonders if it’s prophetic, this happening to both of them at the same time.

“Pretending is a strong word.” Eddie turns like he’s going to pace, then seems to remember the room is the size of a postage stamp and falls back against the wall with a _ thunk. _ He looks wild eyed. “Yesterday I went to a coffee shop and worked on my novel.”

“Your novel.” This is the first Richie’s heard of such a thing. He cannot begin to fathom the idea of what kind of novel Eddie would write.

“Well, okay, it’s an idea for a novel.” Eddie pauses. “And I mostly just went on Facebook and Googled information about the Catholic Archdiocese.”

“Are you writing a story about a priest?” Richie asks, because it might be the only topic he _ could _ imagine Eddie writing about. A repressed, gay Catholic priest symbolically lusting after gluten-filled bread that he can’t eat because he has an allergy, that’s a character he can see Eddie creating.

“No. Or maybe. I just wanted to know how it worked—but my point is, maybe you should quit.”

It seems like an incredibly rash decision to make and he’s starting to consider that this is what a quarter-life crisis would look like, because none of this is anything he would have ever expected from Eddie Kaspbrak.

Though, he guesses not many people would expect to find Richie Tozier crying in the bathroom at two in the morning, so what does he know.

Honestly, he’s still reeling from the revelation that Eddie hasn’t had a job for a week and a half and has been apparently spending his time in coffee shops, brainstorming ideas for a novel about a Catholic priest instead.

“Um,” is all he can think to say. And then, “Are you looking for another job?”

“Obviously.” Eddie waves a hand in the air, but Richie can tell it’s more of a concern than he’s letting on. “I’ll find something with normal hours and lower pay and, I don’t know, go back to school? This is turning into a conversation about me.”

“But this matters,” Richie says. “We live together. You’re, you’re my—”

“Boyfriend,” Eddie finishes, flushing. He looks determined to get the word out, even if it’s difficult.

“Yeah.” Richie can feel grimy tear tracks on his face and he knows his eyes must be bloodshot, but his heart swells at the admission. “You are. And if I’m going to fire my agent before he drops me, I’m going to need a sugar daddy to pay the bills.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Eddie tries to look annoyed, but it’s obvious he’s pleased by the idea. “You need to go to bed. No huge decisions made on three hours of sleep. Come on.”

He offers his hand and Richie takes it.

—

The next day when Eddie goes to a coffee shop, Richie tags along. They share a table and each open up their laptops and then proceed to get no work done for an hour, because Eddie orders a half-blonde, half-decaf quad shot latte with about ten other, discrete instructions in an order he clearly has memorized and Richie can’t just let that go.

“You know the baristas, like, hate you for ordering that, right?” he asks, pointing at the drink in Eddie’s hands, which is double cupped because he ordered it extra hot.

“No. They hate _ you _ for ordering black coffee. It’s boring,” Eddie—a man who just ordered his coffee with two pumps of vanilla, two pumps of hazlenut, and one pump of caramel latte, for a total of _ five _pumps—throws back at him.

“You think the baristas don’t like when people order boring drinks?” Richie is almost sure this cannot be true, but the only food service job he ever worked was busing tables at a family restaurant downtown LA for a year, so he doesn’t have personal experience to back up any claims he might make. “I thought they would love that.”

Eddie looks down at his drink, almost like he’s never considered the complexity of his order. “Maybe some of them do. But if I was a barista—”

“_Are _ you?”

“Obviously not!”

Three and a half black coffees later, they’ve written a passable script for Richie to follow when he fires his agent, complete with stage cues. 

It’s all violently normal, something he could see them doing on any given afternoon in the future, in whatever future he hopes they’ll be able to have. He feels momentarily sick with want for this kind of normalcy, the two of them together, their legs tangled under the table with laptop power cords and crumbs on the table.

“Can we do this again?” he asks, half-thinking that when looks up from his laptop screen he’ll see his mom looking back at him. It feels like a question he would have asked her as a kid, if he’d been a more considerate kid, and the words make him feel distinctly childlike in their earnestness.

“Write a vaguely threatening one-man play where you fire your agent?” Eddie asks, shutting his own laptop. He looks genuinely confused.

“No, just come here. Or wherever. Together.” Richie quickly looks back down at the browser window he has open, refreshing the tab he has open even though there’s no need. He’s desperate to have something to do, something else to focus on besides whatever feeling might flash through Eddie’s eyes.

“Oh.” Eddie says the word so softly, it’s almost a whisper.

Richie is far too aware of the fact that the hair on the back of his arms is standing up. “I know you said it was hard, showing affection in public—so I understand. I’m understanding. I’m _ trying _ to understand. Does it get it across clearer when I say it like that, three different ways, or—?” He laughs weakly.

Eddie’s hand is warm against his wrist, fingers on his pulse, and Richie isn’t sure when he leaned that way across the table. He isn’t sure when, in the past several hours, they got this close. He isn’t sure how he didn’t notice it or think about what it might mean.

“We can do this again,” Eddie says, simple as that.

And this time Richie isn’t even tempted to imagine what it might have been like if this had happened when they were in high school. He doesn’t bother to superimpose a snapshot of this moment on top of an image from the past. It doesn’t feel necessary or helpful.

Instead, he lets himself be held in this small way and begs himself not to forget this feeling.

Eddie willing to touch him in a place where anyone could see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter has been through many rewrites, all through which [synthetica](https://archiveofourown.org/users/synthetica/pseuds/synthetica) has been a godsend. as always this fic would not be what it is without them!
> 
> i also just recently got done moving, which delayed this chapter and caused me to slack off on replying to comments last chapter. i cannot express how much hearing what you guys think means to me! every single piece of feedback is appreciated and i hope to hear what you think about this one. not much happens in this chapter, but there were a lot of character beats and moments of growth i felt needed to be hit upon before we moved into the home stretch.
> 
> see you next time. ♡


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